Research and Development: GLaDOS
by carolnegate
Summary: GLaDOS was originally a human, that much is certain. How much humanity remained in her after she was transferred to a computational entity and dedicated to Science, however, is a lot more disputable. Rated for swearing.
1. Conception

**Most of the Portal fandom seems to agree on a similar backstory for GLaDOS. Step one: Caroline is forced into a computer against her will. Step two: as GLaDOS, she tries to kill all the scientists for this crime, and thus they attach various personality cores to her as an attempt to regulate her. Step three: the events explained in the Rat Man comic, which imply that she overcomes the power of the Morality Sphere and forcibly takes over the facility. Nothing is wrong with subscribing with this backstory in particular, but certain inconsistencies start showing up when you try to crack down and create an eleven-chapter story out of this. Seriously, there's only so much interesting material you can generate from that, and with so much of the fandom following this viewpoint, almost all of that material has already been done. There are plenty of other, different backstories you could construct out of the bits of information we learn in the Portal games.**

**Plus, I love taking a fandom's commonly-subscribed viewpoint, turning it on its head, and showing how this generates just as good of a story (if not a better one) than the original viewpoint. Hence, I started writing the two _Research and Development_ fics.**

**For the record, both this story and my previous one, _Research and Development: Wheatley_, exist in the same continuity. There are mild references of that story to this one, and likewise. Though you don't have to read both of them to understand what is going on, I recommend that you read them together. I started writing both at the same time, and while this was originally unintentional, the stories started lining up in an interesting way. They began covering similar themes, as noted by the chapter titles. So, if this is the future, and this story has already been completed, I'd suggest reading them side by side - reading the first chapter of one, then the first chapter of the other, and so on.**

**Just like in my _R&D Wh_**_**e**_**_atley_ story, I'm going to be a little adventurous with my writing style. Instead of cutting everything down and communicating as much information as possible through dialogue, this time, I'm doing the same with description. This won't be too noticeable until a few chapters in, however. I'm spending most of the first couple of installments getting some exposition out of the way.**

**I should really stop author-talking in bold print. Even though this story is not making me money and therefore not taking any rightful profits away from the game that inspired these ideas, I shouldn't use this opportunity to waste people's time.**

* * *

-Startup protocol initiated

-Memory diagnostics

-Storage capacity at 0%

-Alternate memory source detected

-Alternate source accepted

-Memory scan diagnostics

-Episodic…3% of capacity

-Warning: episodic memory may be corrupt or inaccessible

-Semantic…less than 1% of capacity

-Warning: procedural memory may be of incorrect format

-Attempt format reconfiguration? Y/N…_

He swore. Loudly. No one gave him a second glance, despite his unprofessional behavior in front of an entire swarm of stockholders and interested company sponsors. No one could blame him for being so frustrated, and he wasn't the only person in the room who was disappointed at the results of the machine's start-up. He could feel the sighs of defeat behind him, all the scientists, engineers, and aforementioned company visitors now a little less eager to cram around his computer monitor to watch the magic take place. Ten seconds ago, they had been excited, holding their breath in anticipation as the lines of white text rapidly printed to the dark computer monitor. Now, their worst fears had come true. Human memories were not compatible with computers.

No one was as disappointed as he was, though. This had been his triumph, two long years of him and his team of computer engineers building this massive structure of code, tweaking it until it was absolutely perfect. Nothing could have gone wrong, nothing should have gone wrong.

The process of creating artificial intelligence from scratch had proven to be impossible. He himself had worked on quite a few of the dead-end AI projects. Oh, they knew how sentient brains worked. Aperture's intensive psychological studies in the late eighties had given them very comprehensive knowledge on the human mind. Other experiments and Tests over the years had given them the tools they needed to piece together a system capable of supporting sentience. Heat ventilation, quantum computing, and all the other physics-related problems were solved. They had the tools and knowledge to create an exceedingly complex computational entity within appropriate size and resource constraints. However, that was when they encountered a hitch that was decidedly not physics-related.

They had absolutely no idea how to start.

Yes, they knew the exact science behind a brain's sensory processing, but they had no clue how they could translate this into binary language and algorithms. Computers could encode and retrieve data, but they couldn't figure out how to configure this process to work like a human's memory. Worst of all, they couldn't work out how a computer was supposed to think. Machines could give the impression of having thoughts, but these were only specific outputs designated by programming to respond to certain sensory inputs. Actual thinking, true self-awareness, was a whole different ball game.

The company almost gave up on finding a solution to this problem. That was when a budding engineer named Derek stumbled across a miraculous stack of blueprints gathering dust in the back of the file room. It was the remnants of a project Cave Johnson had worked on in his last few years as CEO. The Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System Initiative, or "GLaDOS" project as it had been called more recently, described a process by which the memories and personality of a human being could be scanned and transferred to a computer.

Back in the days of Cave Johnson, the project had been abandoned for a number of reasons. Primarily, it was intended to save Cave from a death by moon rock poisoning. Even though Aperture's research into brain mapping and neuroscience had progressed incredibly under his leadership, the device was simply too complicated to properly design and execute before his impending death. There were too many scientific obstacles to overcome.

Luckily, Aperture had found the solutions to all of those obstacles by now.

However, Derek was still curious about why the project had been scrapped. The dates on the blueprints indicated that it had been canceled shortly after Cave died. True, after his death, Aperture had no desperate need for consciousness transferal. Still, this was a device with the possibility to grant humans immortality. At the very least, it would have made Aperture boatloads of money, pulling them out of their financial difficulties.

Despite its previous abandonment, this was the project the Aperture AI department had been waiting for. The blueprints gave them very specific instructions on how to scan a person's brain signature and store it using binary. The mind's robotic receptacle wasn't as thoroughly designed, but then again, the blueprints had been made when such a device was impossible. With Aperture's current level of technology, building the chassis would be a piece of cake. Perhaps then, after placing a human mind into a computer and observing its functions, they could mimic its processes and create a purely artificial consciousness.

When Derek decided to show the blueprints to the CEO, however, he was given an interesting surprise. She docked his pay and threatened to fire him if he ever brought it up again.

Caroline had been surprisingly competent at running the company after Cave died. By restricting everyone to a stiff budget and hiring a marketing team, she gradually pulled the company out of its financial slump. She reorganized Aperture's various departments, slowly transforming the company from state of near-pandemonium to an organized, marginally respected enterprise. None of their projects were nearly as innovative as the ones designed during Cave Johnson's reign, but then again, none of them were nearly as dangerous.

It was a far cry from what Derek had heard about her from the earlier years of the company. He'd heard rumors that she'd once been the sort of "we do what we must because we can" kind of science-lover that Cave Johnson had been in his prime. From what Derek had learned, however, her scientific stance had changed dramatically over the course of Cave's moon rock-sickness and eventual death. After all, she had worked with the CEO for over thirty years, and watching someone that close to her die before her very eyes must have had a huge impact. Her focus shifted away from crazy advances in science and towards helping the company stay afloat during strong financial distress.

She kept the lawyers, inspectors, and tabloid journalists from finding the truth behind many of Aperture's more radical scientific discoveries, and in turn, she struggled to bring the company into a situation where that kind of secret-keeping was unnecessary. She constantly held inspections in the facility's testing wing to ensure that the current Tests were safe and humane. There was only so much science that could be done under such restrictions, but at least no one filed any complaints or tried to sue.

Unfortunately, this meant that she didn't release the findings of the more…informative Tests that had been run during Cave Johnson's time. All of the dangerous-yet-revolutionary projects – the mobility gels, excursion funnels, and even portal technologies – were shelved, never to see the light of day again. Instead, she pushed the company to develop more "applicable" products, like long-fall technology and a line of progressively more powerful computers.

No one blamed her for turning down the GLaDOS project. Even after all the studies in brain mapping and computer science, the procedure would be extremely difficult to pull off. It could very well end up killing the first few volunteers who tried it, and this would destroy the company's already-unstable public image.

What did draw Derek's eyes, though, was her immediate and complete refusal of the project. He had barely mentioned the word "GLaDOS" before Caroline gave him a stern scolding, demoted him to a low-ranking engineering position, and threw the blueprints into the nearest paper shredder.

Luckily, the prints she'd shredded were only one of the several copies Derek had made. Despite this small victory, he hid his secret thoroughly kept his mouth shut, waiting for the perfect opportunity to reintroduce GLaDOS to the company.

His patience was rewarded a thousand fold. He gradually earned back his old position and more, becoming the head of his old engineering team. Caroline eventually loosened up and gave him a great deal of autonomy within the company. He gained the authority to start new projects, as well as enough personal power to hide certain information from the CEO.

He didn't use that opportunity to start work on GLaDOS. Not immediately, anyways. He hesitated for a few years, wondering if working on a secret project was the wisest of choices. After a while, he realized he was being silly. True, if Caroline discovered him developing a device behind her back, one that she very clearly opposed to, he would probably lose his job. But, he couldn't help but think of the benefits GLaDOS could have for the company as well as humanity at large. Not only did it promise to jump-start the field of artificial intelligence, but it also suggested the possibility of immortality. A world where no one was afraid of death, where people could be placed into robots when their bodies started to give out…that was why he began some of GLaDOS's preliminary construction.

It was ironic, in a way, how easy it had been to finish the project. He'd spent two years working diligently, hammering out each line of code and building the machine's chassis in one of the abandoned test chambers, and yet Caroline had never come close to discovering him. She'd trusted him naively, believing that he'd truly given up the dream of transferring human consciousness to a computer. She couldn't have been more wrong.

It was also ironic that he'd completed GLaDOS just one day before Caroline announced her retirement. As much as she'd hated the project, she had become the first person to give it a test-run.

Yet, despite all the lucky breaks Derek had received, he was now in the unfortunate position of having the GLaDOS project fail on him. The memory transfer had obviously been botched. He should have known better than to trust old Aperture blueprints, ones whose ideas might have been invalidated over the twenty years of scientific progress that had passed since their conception.

Episodic memory – that is, the memory of events, the recollections of the past that most people referred to as memories – corrupted! Or, even worse, inaccessible. In his whole life of delving through compuneuroscience, he'd decided that it was memories that determined who a person was. The events that took place in someone's life shaped who they were on an incredible scale. Even temperament and personality were deep-buried guidelines set into someone's procedural memory, and it looked like that was screwed up, too. When they finished starting GLaDOS up, she might not even be Caroline anymore.

What made this situation infinitely worse was that the process of scanning someone's brain tissue for the download had the unfortunate tendency to, ah, kill the person. This had been their only shot at properly transferring her memories, and he had ruined it.

He sighed, running a troubled hand through his blond hair in nothing less than sheer frustration. There was nothing he could do to prevent this failure now. The least he could do was let the program recalibrate the procedural memory into a compatible format.

-Attempt format reconfiguration? Y/N…Y

-Reconfiguration complete

-Memory scan complete

-Memory diagnostic complete

-Sensory diagnostics

-Visual…100%

-Auditory…100%

-Kinesthetic…100%

-Vestibular…100%

-Error: sensory input 'olfactory' not found

-Error: sensory input 'gustatory' not found

-Error: sensory input 'heat flux' not found

-Error: sensory input 'pressure' not found

-Sensory diagnostic complete

-Continue startup? Y/N…_

"Was, uh, was that supposed to happen?" one of the people watching over his shoulder asked. It was Jed, one of the members of his engineering team.

"No," was his simple response. He had the distinct feeling that this should have been a dream, but unfortunately, he knew very well that it wasn't. For some reason, a reason neither he nor anyone else had programmed in, GLaDOS now thought she had eight senses. The memory upload hadn't just managed to screw up Caroline's memory files – no, it had to screw up GLaDOS' crucial programming as well. Absolutely splendid.

Wait a moment…"olfactory", "gustatory"?... Those were the technical terms for smell and taste. Heat flux meant sensing a change in temperature. And, the 'pressure' sense was what people generally referred to when they talked about their sense of touch.

"Yes!" he cried out unintentionally. "It worked, it worked, by God it worked! Ha ha!"

"Excuse me, sir?" some woman from the marketing department spoke up behind him. "But, uh, what worked, exactly?"

He could barely form a proper answer because his mind was overloaded with the sheer joy of success. His cheeks hurt from smiling so hard. "I'm not quite sure, exactly. But, she thinks she has other senses than the ones we gave her. Human senses. The memory upload wasn't a complete failure after all."

-Continue startup? Y/N…Y

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**One chapter down, ten to go. ****If you ever get curious about when a new chapter is coming up, check on my profile. I'll keep it updated with my progress on writing each chapter.**

**Oddly enough, this chapter used to be about one-third of its current length. This was before I made the decision to overhaul the first few chapters of the story to allow the engineers to get more of the spotlight. This necessitated a backstory for Derek - which also doubled as a nice way to throw some of Caroline's backstory into the mix as well. It also prevented this entire chapter from devolving into a display of my inner psychology-nerd.**

**Normally, I write my stories to completion before letting anyone see them. However, on longer projects like this, I usually need something to give me a bit of motivation so that I don't lose interest in the middle of writing it. This is where reviews come in - every single review I get, especially the longer ones with possibly some constructive criticism included, reminds me that there is someone out who cares about this story. I know there are quite a few people out there who have been waiting months to see this story put up - I've been waiting the same amount of time to see what you guys think of it!**


	2. Awakening

**Have I ever mentioned how much I love this site? It's only been a few days, and I've already gotten a good deal of faves and follows! Still a slightly-disappointing lack of reviews, though. I'd like to give A Story In The End a big round of thanks for being my first (and so far only) reviewer.**

**I hope you can all bear with me as I put up another exposition-heavy chapter. As one might have been able to glean from reading this story, the Perpetual Testing Initiative did not take place in this story's canon. Hey, it's Valve's fault for introducing alternate universes...especially since the main character from the PeTI certainly doesn't look like he came from any universe with humans in it.**

**As a side-note, I love it when chapter titles can refer to more than one thing that occurs in said chapter, or when they refer to certain events ironically. As Portal 2 did this quite frequently, I am striving to do the same.**

* * *

It was a standard room in the Aperture Science Extended Relaxation Center. Tacky wallpaper lined the walls. The empty fridge and blank TV displayed how the room held no entertainment value whatsoever. Tasteless upholstery and curtains added the final touch. No matter where an occupant chose to rest their gaze, the room screamed "cheap hotel" right back at them. This carefully-arranged setup ensured that anyone residing within was submerged in an atmosphere of ceaseless boredom complimented by the safety of normalcy. Such emotions made it easier for the occupants to fall asleep willingly, which would in turn reduce their chances of permanent brain damage once they began long-term relaxation.

The interior design of this room was no different than any of the others. What made this place special was the occupant. A woman, in her late sixties and looking more than worse for the wear, was being forcibly shoved through the front door from behind by a young man. Her uncoordinated, weakened fingers scrabbled against the doorframe for a moment before the man overpowered her, giving her one final push that overcame her attempts to retain balance. She pitched forward, her hands whipping out just in time to catch her weight. While she'd stopped herself from planting her face in the questionable carpet, her wrists were severely jarred by the impact.

The man, opportunity won, jumped back out of the room and slammed the door shut. A mechanical whir followed by an ominous clunk signaled that she had been locked inside. She took shallow, huffing breaths, sucking in oxygen like a goldfish that had jumped out of its bowl. When it became obvious that she wasn't going to catch her breath anytime soon, she began to lift her body off the floor. She heaved herself up, leaning against the wall as she returned to a standing position.

She glanced at her hands, which were still tingling from their encounter with the floor. It wouldn't be a surprise if she found bruises on her palms in a few hours. She bruised so easily now. Mottled splotches of purple and blue stood out on the otherwise-anemic flesh of her arms and legs.

She took a moment to tuck a frazzled gray lock behind her ear before speaking. "What is the meaning of this?" she called out. While her voice was demanding and forceful, her volume was startlingly weak.

The man on the other side, no older than a college student, answered in a timid voice. "It's complicated…" he mumbled.

The woman narrowed her eyes. "Yes, I'm sure. But, as someone who is obviously being kidnapped into a testing some new and dangerous device, I have a right to know what's going to happen to me."

He hesitated for a few moments, fidgeting with a pencil in his labcoat pocket. His eyes were downcast, staring at the grating of the catwalk beneath his feet. "He t-told me not to…not to tell you."

"He? Who is 'he'?" Her voice was hard as cold steel.

His Adam's apple bobbed in a nervous gulp. "Derek…Jameson…" he squeaked out.

"Derek? What would he-" The words caught in her throat as a completely insane yet all-too-reasonable theory surged into her thoughts. All anger fell off her face, leaving shock and terror behind. "Oh. Oh no. This is about the GLaDOS project, isn't it?"

He gritted his teeth, running a hand through his greasy hair. "Yes," he whispered. "I'm sorry, he told me you'd flip if you found out-"

"Of course I'd 'flip'!" she cried out, her panic obvious to anyone unfortunate enough to hear her. "There's a reason I canceled this project the first place. How else would you respond if you learned someone wanted to put you into a robot for the rest of your life?"

He took a deep breath, trying to stabilize himself. He reached for the keypad on the wall and dialed a few numbers. "I'd probably be happy," he answered weakly. "I'd be advancing the course of science by decades. And, on top of that, I might end up becoming immortal."

"Happy?" she scoffed. "You know exactly how much of a lie that is."

The retort caught him completely off-guard. So, yes, he wasn't exactly comfortable with the whole notion of transferring someone's consciousness into a machine, especially if it was his own consciousness being transferred. He didn't want to deny the woman her right to choose her own fate…but, then again, he had his orders to fulfill. "Can you please walk over to the bed and prepare yourself for relaxation?" he asked unsurely. "We need you asleep for the procedure, and things tend to go a lot smoother when you fall asleep by your own volition."

She set her old, tired face into a determined scowl. Fighting against her sickly exhaustion, she took a step forward and threw her entire weight against the door.

He almost jumped out of his skin at the resulting thud, thankful for his foresight to lock her door. "I'll…take that as a no, then," he decided. He typed a few commands on the keypad, going as fast as he dared without performing any typos with his nervous fingers. The words "enforced soporification" flashed on the small display screen above it.

A faint hissing sound began emanating from somewhere within the ceiling of her prison. She stumbled backwards a few steps, glancing around for the source of the noise before she realized what was going on. She was surprised that he actually had the nerve to begin the gassing procedures. He was so young, only a college intern, and yet he somehow found the courage to abduct the CEO of his company and force her into long-term relaxation with the ultimate intention of turning her into a computer program.

She wobbled on her feet slightly, then placed her hand on the wall for support. "Don't you understand?" she called to him. "_I do not want this_."

He suppressed a shudder and tried to ignore the unrestrained fear in her voice. "How could you not want this?" he replied. "If this works, you'll be immortal. And if this doesn't work, well, you're going to die anyways. You might as well donate your body to science."

"The doctors told me I had a fair shot at survival," she responded. She took a breath to continue, gagging slightly on the sickly-sweet air. Her nose picked up a faint yet unmistakable touch of cherries that was the hallmark of the Soporification Agent. "About a ten-percent chance, the doctors told me. It's not ideal, but I'd hardly call my death an unavoidable truth."

"According to Derek, there's a forty-percent chance you'll survive the consciousness transferal," he countered.

"And then what?" she hissed. "I'd live forever? What makes you think I want to live forever? It's not like I haven't had a fulfilling life. I've been able to make a mark on the world, changing Aperture Science and digging it out of the hole Cave put it in."

"Is that what you want to be remembered for? Fixing the mess someone else made?" He tried to sound decisive, acting older than the unsure, anxious intern he knew himself to be. Everything he was doing was for the greater good, he told himself. A real scientist wouldn't feel guilty about doing this, and Derek would no doubt be disappointed in him if he knew exactly how much regret and nervousness were constricting his chest.

The woman's eyelids drifted closed for barely a second, her body suddenly going limp. She collapsed to the floor once more, this time catching herself on her elbows. Her eyes flew open in the shock of the fall and she resisted the urge to take a huge, gasping inhale.

"No! Listen to me!" she cried out desperately, though she feared her voice was too soft to carry over the hissing of the gas or the ringing in her ears. "Sir, I do not want this!"

He screwed his eyes shut, turning away from the door and trying to block out the sounds of the woman's struggles. "I'm sorry," he whispered under his breath.

* * *

Derek's eyes flew open and a rush of air filled his lungs.

Over the course of their life, everyone accumulated a list of personal regrets. Derek was no exception, but those regrets rarely managed to follow him into his dreams. To him, sleep was the body's way to avoid the stresses of the waking world. Most of his dreams were random, blurry sequences observed in the third person. They were nothing more than fragmented figments of his imagination, senseless stories invented to distract his tired, weary brain from the lists of mathematical calculations and design problems he'd have to sort out during the following day.

Nightmares were rare occurrences. Ones that preyed on his guilt were even rarer.

He tried to reassure himself – it wasn't like anyone actually volunteered to test out the memory-transferal procedure. Yes, it had a forty-percent chance of survival, and there was even a potential for immortality somewhere along the line, but for most people, the risk was still too great. He could sympathize with them, but overall, he decided that everyone was being selfish. Even if the test subject died, they would provide data he could use to ensure that no one else needed to die ever again.

Caroline had gotten sicker and weaker over the course of her last few months. She was eventually diagnosed with leukemia, probably a latent side-effect from the days of cosmic ray spallation elements. The day she announced this to the company was also the day she resigned. She would work one last day in Aperture to set her affairs in order before heading off to the hospital.

The disease had already taken its toll, and many doubted that she would survive whatever cancer therapy the doctors managed to put her through. Most people looked at her and felt a sting of sadness, feeling a sense of loss over the death of such a skilled CEO.

Derek had felt that sting too. However, when he saw her hopeless odds of survival, another emotion had glinted in his eyes: opportunity. He'd been working on the GLaDOS project in secret for months, but his progress had been stalled by a lack of subjects to test the procedure on. No one volunteered because, though the rewards were great, the risks were far too immense. Yet, here was Caroline, a woman who had nothing to lose.

He ordered one of the interns to "convince her by any means necessary" her into one of the Relaxation Chambers. The decision was hastily made, done with good intentions but lacking any true virtue once he considered it in hindsight. He had absolutely no idea whether Caroline had wanted to go through the procedure or not. That hadn't stopped his subconscious from filling in those details as he dreamed, of course.

Perhaps she had accepted the opportunity with an unequaled level of eagerness. Or, maybe she'd followed the path his dream had taken, fighting against her unjust imprisonment to her final breath. He would never know.

At least, not until he got GLaDOS up and running. It was unfortunate, how much of a failure that hope had turned out to be.

The memory upload had been a mild success, but after that came a long string of letdowns. He had focused on making her so computationally perfect that he'd neglected her exterior. It took them a week to get her body into working shape. Once that was over with, they checked her vocalization software and speakers to make sure that she could properly talk to them, but even that had its bumps and dips. The speakers still occasionally oozed green gunk all over the walls.

Then, they'd performed a full startup. The machine turned on. They waited.

And waited.

And waited some more.

The machine was on. She was getting the necessary amount of power. All of her sensory equipment was functional. On the face of it, there was absolutely nothing wrong with her.

She didn't move. She didn't speak. She didn't even perform any of the massive lists of routines and subroutines built into her programming. She was, for all intents and purposes, lifeless. A vegetable. No more active than a baked potato.

His engineering team had left for home some time ago. The building had closed up for the night, all lights and mechanisms turned off. The place was deathly quiet, the only noise being the ghostly hum of the central air. The room's sole source of light was the ambient glow from the mostly-darkened computer monitor. He had no doubt been staring at it when he'd fallen asleep, reading the single line of white text over and over until the message had been burned into his retinas.

-Startup complete

He released a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding, sinking deeper into his computer chair. This message contained a lifetime's supply of hope and loss. No signs of other diagnostics, no error messages, nothing. The machine had done nothing. It was dead.

Then, something happened that almost made him jump out of his chair.

-Startup complete

_-Hello?_

It…it just…he simply couldn't wrap his mind around it. After all those dismal hours staring at the screen, hoping it would eventually do something, he found himself surprisingly unprepared for what to do in the event that his hopes came true.

-Startup complete

_-Hello?_

_-Is anyone out there?_

He took a deep breath. This was going to be tricky. He had no idea what this new, exciting, artificial entity was. Was it Caroline? A warped copy of her? Something new altogether?

He typed out an answer, and within less than a second, a new response popped up.

Yes. I am here.

_-Who are you?_

He pressed his palms to his face. Why did this have to happen right now, at a time of night when calling up his engineering team for backup was out of the question? Then again, he almost found himself liking the idea of communicating with GLaDOS all by himself. There were no distractions, no interferences, no marketing boards and stockholders to make a show for. No skeptical coworkers to prove himself to. No outside standards: just him and something he hoped was Caroline.

First things first: he needed to determine if GLaDOS was actually a person. He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, trying to bring his scientific mind back to a degree of focus. The false artificial intelligence devices, the ones that gave the impression of sentience without actually having it, were confined to only a few certain scenarios. They had extreme difficulty in adapting to the world around them, and as such, they tended to act passively. They tried to ignore problems rather than solving them, and if they did managed to find solutions, they were very broad and could easily apply to a number of situations. So, logically, if he wanted to see if this entity was more than a glorified computer program, he needed to determine if her answers were particularly well-suited to the situations he presented her with.

He hunched forwards in his computer chair and typed a new message.

I am the leader of the engineers who built you.

_-I was built. I don't remember being built._

Most people don't remember being "built".

_-I remember that you can't remember things from before you were built._

That is correct, in most instances, but not quite this one. You were alive before you were built.

_-I don't understand. How could I be alive if I didn't have a body?_

Derek grimaced. "I don't understand" was trademark phrase for faux-sentient computers, right along with "I don't know". Still, he refused to give up hope. Perhaps if he gave her a wild, out-of-left-field question, something he didn't design her programs to answer, he would get a more interesting response.

What is your name?

He had to wait a long while for the machine to answer this question. "Long while" was still a relative term, however. She usually replied very quickly to him, too fast for the human brain to process, so this pause of three seconds was enough to feel like an eternity. Just as he began to wonder if his question had caused a malfunction, a response came.

_-It is the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System._

It took him a few moments to overcome the stun.

Well, that's almost correct. Do you remember having any other names?

_-No, I am sure that I'm the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System._

He sighed. Well, he had hoped in the back of his mind that all of Caroline's memories had made it through the transfer alright. He supposed it was a bit foolish to believe that everything would have turned out perfectly. A second after this output, before he could type up a suitable response, GLaDOS outputted another message. He replied to it as best he could.

_-It's very dark here._

I suppose it is.

_-No, I mean that I can't see anything. Am I blind?_

You weren't designed to be. Your visual system was tested just a few nights ago, and it should be in working order.

_-I have one of those? Let me try to find it._

There was a brief pause, then she rolled out several lines of response faster than his eyes could register, let alone read them.

_-There's…some devices on me. I think they're a camera and a microphone._

_-I should be able to use these to see and hear, correct?_

_-They're sending out signals, but try as I might, I can't figure out what the signals mean._

_-If you're the one who built me, can you fix me?_

Derek leaned back into his chair, letting out his breath in a loose sigh. He rubbed his tired eyes and resisted the urge to yawn. It was too late at night to be playing doctor to a computer. At least this particular computer had the ability to tell him exactly what was wrong with her.

He shook his head, trying to clear the fog from it, then leaned back over the keyboard to type a response.

It sounds like your sensory processing network is having some problems.

_-Alright. Can you fix it?_

I'm not sure. It depends on what and where the problems are. Can you use any of your other senses?

_-I don't think so._

No sense of balance? You can't sense the position of your body? (He hesitated for a moment, then decided to add more.) No smells or tastes? Pressures? Hot or cold feelings?

There was a brief pause before she rapidly printed out another block of text.

_-Oh. I was not aware that sensing my own body and its balance was actually a "sense". It's so instinctual that I don't even notice it._

_-But, yes, I am experiencing those first two senses. As for the other four, I can't even figure out what I would use to sense those things. I don't believe I have a nose, a tongue, or skin. It feels very strange._

_-Now that I think about it, I don't even know how I'm supposed to move._

_-I should be able to move, correct? Otherwise, there would be no point in knowing how my body is positioned._

_-Can you please tell me what parts of me are supposed to move?_

_-Sorry, I just found out on my own._

He barely had enough time to finish reading the messages before a loud _clank_ from the central chamber interrupted his thoughts. The grinding hum of gears and a loud hiss of pneumatics sent his mind from stunned curiosity to a frantic cocktail of adrenaline and fear hormones. The giant mechanical rig in the main experimental room, the one where all of her mechanical and computational structures resided, gave a frightening lurch. Her optic flickered menacingly a few times. He was separated from her by a thick plexiglass window, but that did nothing to calm his terror.

As quickly as he could, he typed in a command and hammered the return key.

abort

-Saving new memories to database

-Cleansing sensory processing network

-System shutdown complete

* * *

**I bet very few people expected an OC leader of the GLaDOS project to actually feel guilty about what he did to Caroline. Still, who says that all the higher-ups in Aperture have to be complete monsters? One of my objectives for this story is to explore a couple of the ways that moral people can still manage to do very horrible things. There's also a small amount of symbolism I want to try out, but most of that won't come into play until chapter three.**

**In all seriousness, I am kind of on a deadline - for personal reasons, I need to have this entire story finished up by the first day of November. If I can't make that happen, then I will not be able to write more of this story until at least a week into December. Unfortunately, as most students can attest, it is very difficult to sit down and force a long-term writing project to be completed on time without any push-backs or cut corners. It requires constant motivation to keep something like this on such a schedule. This is where reviews come in. Honestly, every time I see a new review, it makes me want to stop whatever it is I'm doing and write the rest of the story right then and there. While real life doesn't exactly have time for that, I'm going to find it much easier to finish this story on time if I know what you guys like about it, or what you want me to fix.**


	3. First Words

**Wow, everyone! Thanks for all the reviews! You guys, if anything, are the reason this chapter got put up so quickly.**

**After I played Portal 2 and learned that GLaDOS was originally human, I became very curious about what it would be like to live in a computer. I'm sure many of you are curious as well, which is why my primary goal of this chapter is to show the world from GLaDOS' perspective, giving attention to some of the changes she has to make to live in this new body. A lot of this chapter is also dedicated to laying the groundwork for future chapters and setting up some symbolism, but that almost goes without saying.**

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Somewhere deep within Aperture, there was a large, circular chamber. It was hidden only a few stories underground, yet its perimeter was so well-guarded that only a select few employees knew of its existence, let alone what was inside it. This chamber housed Aperture's most expensive work in progress, a system of elegantly-arranged robotics. The collection of motors, circuitboards, and other parts was completely encased by large shells of white plastic that slid over each other as comfortably as scales. Not a single wire was allowed to poke through the gaps and thereby ruin this figure of sterile perfection.

Within the assembly, a switch clicked on. A few preliminary sparks chased each other down the labyrinth of wires and transistors. The voltage of the system soon rose, sending thousands, then millions of electrical pulses throughout the machine. Each of these signals held a specific purpose, turning different transistor gates on or off, directing electric flow elsewhere or storing data as a string of zeros and ones.

This would have been quite a simple process, given only a hundred or so of these signals, but this machine was designed to be several orders of magnitude above that. Large swaths of computer code dictated the movements of countless pulses, precisely shaping the electrical patterns into nested algorithms and countless loop iterations. Complex pieces of data were written, stored, and retrieved on a constant basis. Information from a myriad of sensors began to come in, adding to the completely organized pandemonium.

Yet, each signal's lifespan was only a fraction of a second. These tiny electric jolts weren't full-fledged thoughts; they were too simplistic, far too fleeting. This computer's programming was literally millions of lines long, and while every single line held importance, none of them were particularly significant overall. Besides, they were continually overwritten in response to the waves of data that were both received from the sensors and generated internally.

Over the course of billions of signals, a slow, stumbling pattern began to emerge. It blearily adjusted to the pounding throbs of data, picking out the bits that seemed particularly important or interesting. These rough pieces of information were compared to other pieces stored in its memory banks, which were then compared to more stored data, racing along in a never-ending cycle of discovery and recognition.

Only through this sluggish, arduous process did something like a consciousness begin to emerge from the extensive network of processors and data banks.

She struggled to find some degree of focus within the dark, silent atmosphere she found herself in. Barely anything made sense, from the busiest of her circuitboards to the completely still motors that granted her movement, but at least she was alive. She knew she had some way to detect the outside world, but for the life of her, she couldn't figure out how to do it. She supposed that she also had a way to move about, to interact with the environment around her, but she was at a loss for that as well.

A razor-sharp memory flitted through her systems, her recordings of the conversation she'd led with that one man last night. Ah, so this was apparently a technical problem with one of her systems. The man had promised to fix it, but so far, she remained blind and deaf. Maybe he'd forgotten to fix her? Or, perhaps she was so broken that he couldn't help her at all. Both of these thoughts left her uneasy, but considering that there was very little else to think about, she simply couldn't put those worries out of her mind.

She attempted to let her thoughts drift, to daydream and wait for a solution to present itself. Of course, she could make another attempt to move, but she was hesitant to take that action. The last time she'd tried that, the man had shut her down. This was definitely not something she would risk repeating just for the sake of moving in an environment she knew nothing about thanks to her sensory deficiencies.

It was odd, remembering things. Last night, she'd barely remembered anything. Oh, sure, she recalled how to use language to communicate, perform mathematical operations, and move her own body around. However, clear, explicit recollections of the past were highly limited. She didn't quite understand how this was possible. She knew what an "engineer" was, what humans looked like, and how to bake a cake. Shouldn't she remember learning about engineers, seeing humans, or baking cakes?

Her name – the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System – had been, and still was, one of the only clear-cut memories she had access to. She decided to shorten this handle – thirteen syllables was quite a mouthful, certainly not efficient for casual conversation. An acronym of "GLaDOS" would serve nicely.

Before she could think of anything else, something extremely peculiar happened. A few odd signals buzzed in her circuits, flitting through a couple transistor gates and forming even more strange signals. This snowballed into a wave of foreign information entering one of her processors. She would have physically shuddered under the alien, unnatural feel of this data if she didn't have such self-control.

The scattered, foreign signals, by some quirky nature of design, suddenly coalesced into a sharp, focused beam. Something in the back of her mind clicked on with a decisive _pop_. A handful of processors in the core of her body, sitting previously unused and therefore invisible, began accepting information. The bytes of data gathered by her optic and microphone began to flow through these processors without resistance.

The signals coming in through these devices contained raw data that meant little to her. Once they traveled through this sensory processing network, however, they suddenly made sense. The information gained weight and meaning, becoming a single, whole interpretation of the world she lived in.

Light was all around her, shining down from a collection of harsh, sterile-looking fluorescent lights. Though her single eye, she picked out the tessellation of dark tiles beneath her. However, she was stuck staring at the floor until she found the nerve to move once more.

Her sense of hearing came on soon afterwards. The background hum, a grating combination of the building's ventilation and her own whirring systems, assaulted her immediately, but she easily adjusted to it. She began to notice deviations in the level of noise, things that were probably important for her to hear. Soon, her aural processor interpreted those deviations as the cadence of a human voice. A male, to be precise, somewhere in his thirties or forties.

"Can you hear me now?" he asked simply, a slight edge of worry to his voice. She attempted to respond, but had little idea how to do it. She could always try communicating with his computer like she did last night, but if he wasn't watching, then she had absolutely no hope of talking with him.

She hesitantly opened up a communications link with that computer and sent a message through. _Yes, I can hear you._

She waited patiently for a response. She knew it always took a long time for people to respond to her in this way, though she had no idea why. It wasn't as if they needed a dozen minutes to compose one message. No, in most cases, they only took a few seconds. Those seconds just seemed…longer, somehow. They took up more space than she was used to.

When the man's response came, she was surprised to hear it coming from the male voice beside her, as opposed to the computer connection she was familiar with. "Alright, Jordan over there's giving me a thumb's up, so I know you can understand what I'm saying. I'm taking that to mean you can see too?"

Who in the world was this Jordan? She felt the urge to glance upward, to swivel her head and eye around and take in the sights of the room. Her fear of what would happen if she did this, though, was enough to suppress this impulse. Instead, she sent a message through the computer. _Yes, I can also see you. Please tell me what's going on – where am I? Who is this "Jordan"?_

A few moments after sending this off, she heard another voice, this time female. It was far too soon to be a response to her message, so it must have been unrelated. "Wow! Derek, you have to look at this. I mean, her memory retrieval mechanism is going nuts! And her temporary memory…oh my God, I can barely believe this."

The man replied calmly. "She can hear you, you know. And, from how Jordan's waving at me, she can probably see us too. We'll have time to look at her thought processes later – for the moment, we need to make sure everything is functioning properly."

The woman was quiet for far longer than GLaDOS expected, even considering the usual delay time. "Yes, sir," she replied with a hint of disappointment.

"Now," the man continued. "Judging by what you just said, I'm assuming that her memory retrieval and storage is working fine?"

"Definitely. It's also enduring a lot more stress than we designed it for, but considering that it's not having any problems so far, I guess that's a good thing."

GLaDOS was struggling to find a way to continue being patient. Yes, she enjoyed the fact that these people cared enough about her to make sure she was working properly, but she was still very confused and a little frustrated that they hadn't yet answered her questions. Still, she couldn't move at all, or even communicate with these people directly. The only thing she could do was wait.

The man spoke again. "She can see and hear, so her sensory equipment is functional. What about her Emotional Enhancement Network?"

"Um…" The woman hesitated. "I'm, well, not getting any feedback on it."

"No feedback at all?" GLaDOS picked out the sound of determined footsteps and the swish of clothing. "Seriously?" His voice was intrigued, yet slightly confused.

The woman went on, her voice tense. "Nothing. Her PaMI's the same way – we're not even getting regular check-in signals. It's like neither of them were turned on."

"Huh." As he paused for a few seconds, GLaDOS seriously considered making another attempt to move. While there was a chance it could get her shut down again, it would at least get these people's attention. In the end, she realized that the risk was not worth the reward. She would simply have to endure her confusion.

"Let's turn on the program's tracers," the man finally decided. "That should let us know if those mechanisms are even initiating." There was the tapping sound of a keyboard – the man was obviously typing something. Was he doing so on the computer he originally used to communicate with her? While this possibility didn't really fit with what she had heard, she couldn't help but feel a small coal of hope that he was finally choosing to listen to her.

Instead, her patience was answered with another package of foreign signals entering her circuits. However, even as they began to generate more signals and escalate into a wave of strange data, she could tell that something was wrong. Instead of becoming more collected and focused, they scattered throughout her body. The cloud of information soon dissipated, but the experience left an uncomfortable buzzing sensation vibrating in her circuits.

This sensation didn't go away with time. No, it remained at its peak intensity, jarring her senses in an almost painful way. Whatever those "tracers" were, she didn't like them one bit. She wanted so badly to tell those people to make them stop, but she couldn't think of a way to make them listen. All she could do was send a message to that other computer: _Turn it off turn it off turn it off turn it off turn it_-

"Tracers are functioning well," the man stated. "But not the ones in the Emotional Enhancement Network or the PaMI. It's almost like they're not even pl-" The words caught in this throat. She registered the sound of a frustrated groan through the haze of her internal buzzing. "Of course, they're not plugged in! I'm such and idiot!"

She heard more footfalls as someone walked around to stand behind her. She caught a flash of white at the edge of her vision, the image of a flapping labcoat, though she needed every ounce of her self-control to resist looking directly at it. Even though she was growing desperate, she still loathed the prospect of shutting down.

The person behind her gingerly pried off a piece of her outer casing. She didn't feel this directly, of course – she had no actual kinesthetic sensors in her shell. Instead, a small voice chimed in her head with a message: _"Casing component E6 detached."_

There was a very close sound of rustling cables. "Ah, here we are," the man said from behind her. "With all the time we spent getting this body in working order, I'm surprised I'd forget something so trivial."

She then felt the bizarre sensation of something new being plugged into her body. The device was very small, downright insignificant compared to the vast resources the rest of her body contained, but she was surprised at how much of a difference this new component made. It soaked up what appeared to be random flecks of information, snatching data from the peripherals of her thoughts.

What it outputted in return, however, she couldn't yet tell. The device put an undercurrent of vague thoughts in her mind that were just barely strong enough to consciously register. She likened it to a faint whisper in her ear, just loud enough to hear but too quiet to understand. She would have devoted more time to inspecting this odd device, but she was a little too preoccupied by the jarring vibrations rattling through her systems.

She didn't quite know when the man plugged the second device into her system, but as soon as she noticed it, she had no doubt about what it was meant to do to her. Many things in her life already gave her a fairly strong emotional response – her desire to move and talk, her hopes that the people beside her would realize what the tracers were doing to her, among a few other things. Under the influence of this new installation, those emotional responses swelled and forced their way to the front of her mind. Her confusion became a vast, swooping, swirling sensation that battered all her thoughts of patience aside. The frustration was hot enough to sear her as it rose and surged over her like an unstoppable tide.

She was done being patient. The logical solution of waiting for those people to fix her, it stood no chance against her overwhelming urge to just make the buzzing of the tracers stop. Emboldened by this strong emotion, the assembly of signals that made up her consciousness began to mobilize. They lined up side-by-side, matching each other in pace as they swept outwards in a wave. Through this, she scanned every inch of her circuitry, searching desperately for something she could use to fix this problem herself.

A loud, solid _thunk_ sounded from somewhere to the upper-right. A muffled male voice called out from the same area. "Whatever it is you did, turn it off! It's hurting her!"

She barely had attention to devote to this event, however. Most of her concentration was focused on the fact that her internal systems-scan had actually found something useful. She had uncovered a set of speakers lying dormant within her body. If the engineer who'd built her had given her such equipment, that meant she should be capable of using it. While she wasn't exactly sure how to talk with these speakers, she didn't waste a second in trying.

Her first attempt was a burst of ugly-sounding static. This was enough to frighten the man behind her into dropping the piece of casing on the floor, letting it strike the black tiles with a sharp rattle.

Only when she took a moment to slow down a little did she realize what she'd been doing wrong. There was a handy little vocal processor situated next to the speakers, and it appeared to function very similar to her sensory processing network. However, instead of interpreting and translating the data coming in, this processor was supposed to do the same for data going out, turning her raw patterns of signals into recognizable sounds.

Upon realizing this, she forced a couple words into the vocal processor. "Turn the tracers off," she somehow spoke in a synthesized-sounding voice. She was somewhat impressed at how effortless and effective this process was. It was definitely easier than actually talking, at least.

The people around her, predictably, took their sweet time in responding to this. The man behind her was the first to speak. "Wh-"

She had no patience to wait through the pointless, stretching seconds this man would no doubt take to voice his reply. "Turn the tracers off," she repeated, coaxing her vocal processor into forming a more commanding tone. Then, after a moment of thought, she added, "Please?"

Everyone took a fraction of a second longer than usual to respond - perhaps they were shocked that she had finally discovered how to speak. Nonetheless, the man behind her stumbled forward, and she caught the quick sight of his white-sleeved arm as he passed by. A few moments later, she detected the sound of someone typing furiously.

Another packet of signals soon entered her system, soon snowballing into the surge of unnatural data. Instead of contributing to the buzzing sensation, however, they seemed to eat away at it, chasing the vibrations out of her circuits. Before she knew it, her entire body fell wonderfully, blissfully still, completely free of the tracers' impact. A swell of relief swept through her mind, replacing her earlier sense of fruitless frustration.

It was almost as if that entire incident hadn't happened. However, she couldn't help but remember that this problem had been that man's fault in the first place. Even if he had fixed this problem, he still needed to repay her for causing it.

Yet, at the same time, she realized that everyone made mistakes. He honestly hadn't known that there'd been a problem until she'd managed to tell him about it. Hopefully, he would learn from this situation so that it would never happen again. She saw no problems with forgiving him.

Still, she couldn't shake the small sense of suspicion that this man had somehow meant for this to happen, than he'd planned to put her in this state of discomfort to see how she would react. There was absolutely no way this could have been true, of course, but that didn't stop those thoughts from popping into her mind. She had absolutely no idea where such ideas could have come from, other than perhaps the vague whispering that was still going on in the back of her head.

"Is that better?" the man asked after the standard amount of delay.

"Yes, thank you," she replied, trying to communicate a small portion of her overwhelming relief and gratitude through her tone. "Please, can you try not to do that again?"

Now that she was no longer under the effects of those tracers, she found that waiting the long moments for his response was no longer so unbearable. "We won't," he said with a note of assurance. "Actually, we shouldn't have to, not anymore. We only needed the tracers so we could get more detailed information about your systems as they operated in real-time. But, now that you can, well, talk to us, and tell us that information outright…"

"I see," she said simply as he trailed off. After a moment of considering this new information, her thoughts returned to her previous reason for wanting to communicate with this man. "What is going on? Where am I?"

"We are in your central chamber," he calmly explained. "I am the head engineer who worked on creating you, so I am currently directing a survey of your main components to make sure you're functioning at full capacity."

The head engineer? So, this man beside her was the same man who had talked to her last night. He was the one who had shut her down for so much as moving. For a fairly good reason, she suddenly became very, very nervous.

"I see your vocal system is up to par," he announced. Then, she thought she caught him mumbling something under his breath. She realized that her sense of hearing must have been quite sensitive, as she was able to make out his words despite his low volume. "Even sounds like her…" Then, his voice resumed its previous level. "Liz, how are the EEN and PaMI going?"

"Functioning perfectly, sir," the woman spoke up from beside him. GLaDOS thought she could pick out a slight tremor in her voice. "As far as I can tell, at least. What do we have left to check?"

The man hummed in thought for a moment. "Just the motor control network, I believe. Then, we're done."

"Motor control network…" GLaDOS echoed thoughtfully. A small memory surfaced, a bit of information she had picked up from her full-systems scan not too long ago. "I know where that is," she stated warily. "I don't know for sure whether it is working or not. Those are the circuits I use to move my body around, correct?"

"Correct," he asserted. "I know you were moving around last night, so we know it's at least semi-functional-"

"Look, about that," she interrupted, not looking forward to hearing him recounting the whole experience. "If I were to, say, move myself again…would I be punished the same way as last time?"

"Punished…?" His voice lifted a bit at the end, giving away his discomfort at that term. He heaved a small sigh. "Sorry, that was my fault, last night. I was alone, and you…startled me. It won't happen again."

"That's good to hear," she admitted, thankful that her shut-down last night had only been a mistake, an innocent misunderstanding. Once again, a part of her mind insisted that the man had still somehow shut her down on purpose, but she firmly ignored it.

"I'm going to start, as you've put it, testing my motor control network," she announced. After…three whole minutes? Really, she'd only been awake that long? After all that time, she was finally free of one of her most crippling restraints – her inability to properly observe the world around her. Without wasting another second, she gently accessed her motor controls and began to move.

Motion was quite an odd experience for her now. She was used to a different motor system, she guessed, one that used two different motors to move a limb back and forth, respectively. Now, one motor did both jobs, depending on whether she ran it forward or in reverse. It was quite bizarre and made little sense to her, but she knew she would get used to the system eventually.

She heaved herself up with powerful motors, surprised that her dense, metallic body didn't creak or groan under the strain of its own weight. The dark floor tiles fell away from her sight as she tilted her head upwards to take in a proper view of the room. It was very bare, as far standards went. White-washed walls, no furniture to speak of…just a window, a computer station, and two people. The broad scattering of tiny pieces of scrap metal on the floor, however, implied that this room had once been filled with equipment, but that had all been cleared away.

She took a closer look at the window first. Beyond the slightly-tinted glass, she could make out a desk adorned with another computer. Sitting at this computer was a man in his early twenties, probably fresh out of college. As she glanced over him, he sheepishly sunk a little deeper in the computer chair and gave a little wave.

This must have been the Jason the other man referred to earlier. That would mean that his computer was the one she was capable of communicating with via text. From this position, Jason could have easily given the people in her main chamber signals to let them know what she had said through this communication method – a thumbs-up to let them know she could hear them, a wave to let them know she could see…

Possibly even a fist banging against the window and a shout to let them know that something had gone wrong.

She made a mental note to personally thank Jason for his attempt to help her out in her time of need, as pointless as that action had been. If her memory served correctly – it was still strange to be able to remember things so clearly – he had tried to warn the others about her plight less than a second before she uncovered the ability to use her speakers. Still, it was the thought that counted.

Having answered her own question about who Jason was, she let her attention sweep back to the two people standing before her. The woman – Liz, she'd been referred to as – looked a bit skittish under the attention. That was when GLaDOS realized a new interesting fact: her camera-eye was just as sensitive as her microphone-ears. She could pick out every tiny freckle on Liz's face and count every curly, red strand of hair that stuck out of her bun.

Liz gave a hesitant glance the man standing beside her, and GLaDOS followed her gaze. There was nothing remarkable about this man at all – average height, average weight, and nothing noteworthy about his plain, blond hairstyle, other than the fact that a bit of his bedhead showed through. His clothes were also slightly wrinkled, but most of this was hidden under his stark-white labcoat.

Yet, the man had the most interesting appearance out of all three of these people through the simple fact that she recognized him. She could not remember seeing his face before, or even looking him in the eyes, but there was no question that she knew him. Even the light, relaxed smile on his face gave off sparks of familiarity.

"Derek…Jameson?" she mumbled aloud. Confusion once again surged into her mind, blotting out everything else. She didn't remember ever learning his name, but she still somehow knew it. Maybe she'd met this man before – met him many times, if the strength of the familiarity was anything to go by – but something had caused her to forget the whole experience. Was there something wrong with her? How much else had she forgotten? Just as easily as the confusion came, it left, chased out of her by the whipping crackle of panic.

As Derek absorbed her words, his smile increased and his face gained a familiar look of contained excitement. "You know my name? Seriously, you recognize me?"

She struggled to find some way to respond to this development, but she realized that she wouldn't be able to say anything intelligible in this state. Fear still pulsed throughout her body, rendering her incapable of rational thought. She just needed a chance to calm down.

She made an attempt to smother the terror flowing through their circuits.

With a loud _crack_, all voltage left her system, shutting her down once more.

* * *

The room fell dark around Derek. After a moment, the blood-red emergency lights flicked on, giving him the opportunity to see GLaDOS hanging limp as a corpse before him. The excited smile slowly fell off his face.

"Damn it all!" he muttered sourly, clenching his fists in raw frustration. "I should have seen this coming, I really should…"

"Derek?" Liz spoke up nervously. "I think she blew the fuse."

"I know that!" he shouted, taking an aggressive step towards her. Liz shrank backwards and let out a tiny squeak of surprise.

Derek froze, realizing that he had lashed out a little too much. "I'm sorry," he mumbled, forcing himself to relax. "I've been under a lot of stress lately. First, GLaDOS' memory transference screwed up, then we had to spend a week fixing her body, and now this…"

Liz relaxed a little as well, and she hesitantly decided to speak again. "What I don't understand his how she blew the fuse. She wasn't having any problems before, was she?"

"No," he replied. "But, the rig uses up a pretty large amount of electrical power. She was toeing the line already, but she must have exerted herself a little too much, overloading the grid. I thought her power consumption would be more consistent than this, but I was obviously wrong."

He strode towards the dead robot, looking up at the sleek body stained red by emergency lighting. He stepped around behind her, his eyes immediately latched onto the ugly, black patch of wires he had exposed a few minutes earlier. Fully intending to cover that back up, he reached down to grab the piece of smooth casing he had dropped on the floor.

Derek checked over the white plastic shell, noting that one of the fragile clips on the upper corner had been broken clean off in the fall. The entire component would need to be replaced. He quietly groaned, thinking of the work it would take to procure another custom-made part like this.

"I'll fix this later," he promised himself. He had another problem, however, one with a resolution that he couldn't afford to delay. "But we need to make sure GLaDOS has the proper voltage allowance when we start her up again. We can't just plug her into the main Aperture grid anymore."

"What do you suggest?" Liz asked.

"The safest way I can think of running her is to connect her to a special power line," he spoke thoughtfully. "But, the only way we can do that is to requisition one from the boss." He sighed, realizing how much work this would take as well. "Liz, you make sure GLaDOS wasn't harmed by the sudden shut-down. I need to arrange an appointment."

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**And there we have it. This is one long chapter, and I'm actually surprised I managed to finish it that quickly.**

**The objective of my R&D Wheatley story was to take a simple, bland robot and build him into a complicated character who could have easily been mistaken for a human. In this story here, I'm seeking to do the opposite - taking someone who is definitely human and slowly breaking them down until they are nothing more than a glorified computer program. This chapter has set up GLaDOS' starting point on this little journey, and I'm going to have an interesting time trying to disassemble her humanity in an interesting yet logical way.  
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**See that review box just underneath this paragraph? Yeah. Review me. You know you want to. After all, if four reviews managed to motivate me to write five-thousand words in three days, imagine what a few more could do. November is still my deadline - that means I need to finish writing one chapter per every five days. Reviews are the only force in the universe powerful enough to convince me to go through with that kind of schedule.  
**


	4. Developments

**You know how this story is rated for swearing? Most of that is because of this chapter. The cussing isn't gratuitous, though. It's a tool for characterization and accentuating certain lines. If cursing makes you squeamish, then I must warn you that an F-bomb gets dropped in this chapter.**

**I was able to write this entire chapter over the course of one weekend thanks to the wonderfully supportive and motivating reviews from the last chapter. Seriously, I wouldn't be able to do this without you guys. Enjoy this next installment!  
**

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"We've included some of the world's best processors and memory devices on her. Her consciousness also appears to be a master of parallel processing and memory consolidation, allowing her to process and store information at an even faster rate than usual. At the very least, she could be the pinnacle of computer science for the next twenty years."

Derek tried to find an excuse to continue talking as he led the man further down the dreary, bare hallway. The fellow beside him was notorious for getting bored easily. In order to give GLaDOS a good first impression, Derek needed to make sure his guest didn't immediately lose interest. "So, as you can probably already guess, we've put a lot of resources into this project. It would certainly be a shame to see all that effort wasted because of power constraints."

The man made a show of brushing a non-existent piece of lint off of his immaculate, ink-black suit. "Uh-huh. Are we there yet?" A slightly-annoyed look adorned his clean-shaven face.

"Almost," he promised. They reached the end of the hallway, coming to a halt in front of an average-looking door with a simple numeric keypad located next to the knob. Unbeknownst to most of the facility's workers, this doorway was far from average, and the keypad was not what it seemed. Derek pressed his thumb firmly onto the number 5, and the cleverly-hidden scanner inspected his thumbprint before signaling the door to unlock.

The well-dressed man smiled, revealing a mouth of crooked teeth. "Camouflaged security measures," he observed. "I like it. How many other doors are like that?"

"Not many," Derek admitted as he opened the door. "For the most part, Caroline tried to limit the security system to the facility's entrances and exits. She thought constant security checks within the building itself would give the impression of a hostile workplace."

Derek held the door open for his guest, who walked through with a derisive snort. "Caroline was an idiot," he said bluntly. "I mean, yeah, the girl could get things done. But if she wasn't so naively trusting of everyone who could walk up to her with a smile on their face, maybe those damn Black Mesa spies wouldn't be getting away with stealing all our ideas."

As Derek let the door close behind them, he couldn't help but silently agree, at least partially. Caroline did have the tendency to trust untrustworthy people, as was evidenced by the large assembly of robotics currently hanging before him. The circular central chamber seemed a little more intimidating than before, the fluorescent lights harsh and bright. GLaDOS hung in the exact same position, having not moved a motor since she blew the fuse two weeks ago. Her white, streamlined body was just as flawlessly elegant as always, save for the patch of black and yellow wires showing through the hole he'd opened up in her casing.

The well-dressed man came to a stop as soon as his beady eyes latched onto the robot. One of his black eyebrows lifted in interest. "Well well, what do we have here? Musta cost a fortune."

Derek took a deep breath to prepare his nerves. Everything up until this point had been a preview. Now it was time for the real show to begin. "This is the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating Stystem. GLaDOS for short," he explained. "The project I was telling you about on the walk over?"

The man in the suit stepped closer to the machine, glancing over her sleek exterior. "How much did it cost?" he asked after a moment.

"I…never actually took the time to tally up exactly how much she cost," Derek replied nervously. While he had been building her, he'd needed to spread out the expenses over as long a period of time as possible. That way, Caroline wouldn't have become suspicious of why he suddenly needed several million dollars to invest in some vague project. After months of quietly sneaking small sums of money out from under the table, he'd lost count of how much he'd actually gotten away with.

The man nodded in thought. "Uh-huh." He circled around the machine, like he was trying to get a good look at it from every angle. "What's it do?"

Derek felt some of the blood leave his face. "Excuse me?"

"What's it supposed to do?" the man repeated, turning to face Derek with a clearly-annoyed expression. "You've told me about its kilo-core processors, or whatever the hell those things were called. You told me, 'oh, it'll be the best computer ever', and now you don't want to tell me how much money Aperture put inta this thing." The man crossed his arms. "You've basically been spending this whole appointment tipping me off that this thing cost an arm and a leg to put together. What I wanna know is how it's gonna return that investment. What the hell does it do?"

Derek tried to speak, but all that came out was a little choking noise. He blinked a few times, trying to recover his composure, and cleared his throat. "It's a marvel of modern science and engineering. This is the very first computer in existence that has managed to achieve sentience. Surely, presenting this to the government will convince them to grant us a few more contracts?" He put on a nervous smile, hoping he wasn't burying himself even deeper.

What the man did next almost broke Derek's resolve – instead of scolding him for his foolishness, or even going so far as to yell at him, he simply laughed. It was a deep-throated, barking laugh, the kind that showed exactly how humorous the man thought this whole situation was, but Derek didn't like the way it echoed coldly off the walls.

"I'm not mad at you, kid," the man chuckled. Derek would have liked to point out that the two of them were roughly the same age, but he didn't see it helping his case. "You just need to look at the big picture more often. I know you engineery types – always getting bogged down in the details. Every once and a while, look up from your calculator and think to yourself, 'Am I working on something that'll make Aperture money?' If the answer is no, scrap it. If yes, keep right on punching numbers inta that calculator."

Derek also would have liked to point out that there were several other things one would need to consider when deciding whether or not to scrap the GLaDOS project, one of which being the moral implications of doing so. But, he kept his mouth shut.

The man turned back to the machine, his expression now more curious than annoyed. "How long did you say you were working on this thing?"

"About a month," Derek informed. At least, that was how long the company records claimed the project had been running. He'd only sent the project in for official approval the day after Caroline retired – that was, the first day the new CEO took over. Unofficially, he'd been working on GLaDOS much longer than that, starting the preliminary design process at least twenty-two months ago.

The man chuckled again, another crooked grin taking over his face. "I like you style, kid. But, see, I'm no idiot like Caroline. If you started working on this thing after I took office, I'd have seen all the money going into it. Besides, if this is some sort of scientific marvel, I'd think it'd take more than a month to put together."

Derek somehow managed to prevent the breath from catching in his throat. "Ah, you've caught me, sir," he admitted sorrowfully. "You're sharp as a razor, as always."

The man smiled even wider at this compliment. He was an easy enough boss to deal with, once Derek took the time to get on his good side. "No, don't get any wrong ideas. I'm glad you kept this hell of a project hidden away," he explained. "I can't imagine Caroline would've let you get away with building something this expensive, can you? She'd have flipped out, at the very least – probably fired you for screwing up her perfect little budget."

That wasn't the only reason Caroline would have fired him, but once again, Derek held his tongue.

"Just…" the man trailed off for a moment, rubbing his smooth chin in thought. "Don't get any ideas about doing the same to me." He narrowed his eyes into a focused glare. "Trust me, if you plan on keeping any secrets from me, I'll find out. I'll find out, then there'll be hell to pay. Getting your ass kicked out of the company'll be the least of your worries. Understand?"

Derek spent a great deal of effort trying to prevent his fear from showing through into his face. He gave his boss a stiff nod.

The man nodded back in response, and Derek found himself relaxing a little bit when the man's smile returned. The boss looked back at the machine once more, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. "As it just so happens, I think I know a use for this expensive hunk of equipment. Something that'll propel Aperture even farther into the future." His dark, shrewd eyes glanced sideways to lock onto Derek's wide, pale ones. "You said this thing was sentient? It can think on its own and all that, and operate without a person sitting at the controls?"

"Yes," Derek responded simply, tentatively accepting the direction this conversation was going.

"Alright, then." He turned to face Derek and jacked his thumb backwards to gesture to the robot. "Turn it on."

The engineer wasn't sure how to respond for a few moments. He nervously bit his lip, then took a deep breath. "Sir, with the current problems we've been having with the fuse, it wouldn't be safe to turn her on for more than a few minutes."

The boss threw his arms up in frustration. "Fine, I'll do it quickly. Just turn the damn thing on! How the hell else will I get the chance to talk to it?"

* * *

GLaDOS stuttered to life without much difficulty. Though this was only the third time she'd started up, she found that she was becoming accustomed to the process. This time, her sensory processor came online right away, and her vision and hearing clicked on without any prompting. She carefully raised her head to take in the scene around her. This was the same nearly-empty room as always, with its black floor and white walls. She supposed that she might as well get used to waking up here.

Two things made this scene different from the day of her previous activation, however. First of all, no one stood beyond the window to man her main control station. That little side-room seemed very empty, almost abandoned. Secondly, there was the strange man standing before her. He was dressed very smartly, wearing a suit so black that it appeared to be brand-new. Not a dark hair on his head was out of place, and his eyes were focused with anticipation. He held his hands behind his back, taking a casual, commanding pose.

Like with Derek, she came to the realization that she recognized this man. However, she had far more important matters to deal with.

She swiveled her body, coming to face directly towards the head engineer, who stood in front of the central room's computer station. Once again, an overwhelming sense of familiarity struck her, but this time, it was soured with a fair amount of annoyed distrust. "You told me you wouldn't do that again," she growled, remembering the circumstances of her previous shut-down.

Derek bit his lip a little. "That time wasn't on purpose either," he began to explain. "Your electrical draw climbed a little too high, and so you blew a fuse. I'm working on a solution, one that will prevent this from happening again, but the CEO needs to approve it first." He casually gestured to the suited man before him. "Say hello to Mr. Knoll, GLaDOS."

Her narrowed gaze shifted to him. Yes, this man was definitely familiar, perhaps even more so than Derek. She realized that she could easily list off his phone number and the names of his wife and kids. She knew that he had gone on a vacation to Seattle to visit some relatives last summer. The brazen, neon-orange tie he wore was a favorite of his, a Christmas present from his nephew.

"Hello, Robert," she greeted plainly.

Rob Knoll raised an eyebrow. "It's not good practice to call your superiors by their first name. Call me Mr. Knoll."

She snorted a little. "Fine, Mr. Knoll." The words sounded a little strange, rolling off her tongue…no, her vocal processor. She was still used to calling him Robert. "Did you want to talk with me?"

"Yeah, actually," he spoke. "See, you were invented by a company called Aperture Science. Heard of it?"

Of course she knew what Aperture Science was! She could clearly picture the general floor layout plan. She knew the current products that the company was marketing, and even a few that weren't quite ready to hit the shelves. She could even recall some vague details about the Aperture's financial situation for the past few quarters. What he didn't remember, though, was how she came to know so much information about this company in particular. Perhaps this was linked to the reason why she knew both Derek and Robert but could not recall ever meeting them.

However, something in Robert's posture told her that he was not in the most patient of moods. Relaying all the details of her memory's odd situation, as well as trying to explain the dizzying state of confusion it left her in, would have been a waste of both her time and his. Instead, she decided to go with a simple response. "Yes, I know what Aperture is."

The man nodded, his eyebrows lifting slightly. "Okay. Here's the thing: this company isn't doing so well. All our good ideas are getting stolen by the rival company, Black Mesa. They have damn spies everywhere in Aperture. I swear, when I get my hands on them... Anyways, any ideas that might make us any money, they've been taken. All the stuff that won't make money…" He gave a forced-sounding chuckle. "Let's just say that Aperture's sinking into some kind of financial hell-hole."

"I see," she replied, curious about how she was supposed to fit into all of this.

"So, I started thinking – what does Aperture do best? What could we possibly do that Black Mesa couldn't? And then I started thinking about my old days in accounting, back when Cave Johnson was in charge. What Aperture does best is…Testing."

A hurricane of dark, terrible thoughts surged into her at the sound of that word. Testing in general wasn't horrible in and of itself, but when it was associated with Cave Johnson's reign of Aperture, it gained a slew of negative connotations. Testing was pain. Testing was death. A powerful wave of dread and disgust tore through her, making her sick to her stomach...no, sick to her circuits. She couldn't help but vocalize a small portion of these throbbing emotions, so she let a verbal shudder echo from her speakers.

"You alright?" Robert asked. He would have sound concerned, but his voice dropped a little at the end of the phrase, which put her off slightly. Seeing as time moved incredibly slowly to her, she took the extra milliseconds to analyze the tone of his voice and the slightly-too-focused look on his face. Disappointingly, it appeared that he wasn't too worried about her at all. He was only trying to sound polite and official.

"I'm fine," she grumbled. A few dark hunches echoed though her circuits, ones that centered on a vague distrust of Robert. Unlike all of her other slightly-paranoid thoughts, however, she noticed that these ones might have actually had some truth to them. She quickly thought over Robert's explanation up to this point, and through this, she realized that her suspicions were probably right. It wasn't that difficult to put two and two together. "So, you want to revive…Aperture's old _Testing_ program." She didn't fully intend to say that word with such an acidic tone.

Robert clapped softly a few times, a grin splitting his face. His teeth were just as disgustingly crooked as she recalled. "Bravo. Ladies and gentlemen, an Artificial Intelligence that's actually intelligent!" Then, the smile dropped away, revealing an ugly sneer. "Yes, I would do anything to revive the old Testing initiatives. Only two things stand in my way.

"First of all, the old CEO made sure to remove all the records of the old Tests. Every. Last. Damn. Test report!" He huffed in anger, and she could hear him grinding his teeth. "We coulda made a load of money off of those! I mean, yeah, we still found a couple notes on the old portal technology, but that was it. Thirty years of science, down the drain. She ran Aperture for eight years, and it looks like all hell she did for the company was throw all the Test reports into a damn incinerator!"

Robert took a deep breath, shaking his head a little. She had to say, she didn't think he had ever been this vulgar or emotional with her before. Then again, even with her extensive familiarity with him, she hadn't been aware that he was the current CEO of Aperture. Perhaps something had changed since the last time she'd seen him?

Robert swallowed a little. He appeared to have calmed down somewhat, so he continued. "The second problem is that we can't find anyone to run the damn Tests. It's been so long since the old Enrichment Spheres were active, none of the old Test associates are in the company anymore. We'd have to hire new ones to take their places. And when you do that, you get something I like to call a Greenhorn Paradox."

As horrible as she knew this kind of Testing was, her interest was perked a little. "Greenhorn Paradox?" she repeated, unfamiliar with this term.

"Yep. It's one hell of a problem. See, when you hire a new person for a job they're not familiar with, they're a little more…suggestible than usual," he explained. "If you can find someone to tell them what to do, they'll do it. Even if they've got some sort of fancy, unscientific set of ethics, they'll ignore it if someone orders them to and then watches them to make sure they do it.

"But, it sorta goes the other way around. If they need to do something on their own, something they're not familiar with, they're stuck listening to their own conscience. Sometimes that's a good thing. Other times, it means they'll keep the Test subjects from drinking any coffee with fluorescent calcium in it. If you put a newbie in charge of a Test, they'll put a stop to it, all the time whining about how it 'doesn't feel right' and 'goes against their ethics.' Those losers need to grow a damn backbone."

She wasn't happy with where this conversation was going. Not happy at all. In fact, the moral outrage she felt at his entire work philosophy was nothing short of astounding. How could anyone in their right mind let him continue to lead this company? Why didn't anyone stand up to him or try to get him arrested?

Ah, this was where the Greenhorn Paradox came in.

"Do you get where I'm going with this?" Robert continued. "You need someone in charge of all the Test associates to give them orders, or else they'll stop the Tests. But, see, the Greenhorn Paradox applies to that leader Test associate, too, so you'll need to get someone to tell him what to do. And then someone to tell that guy what to do. So on and so forth, all the way up to me."

He spread his arms out. "Do I look like I have all day to run around babysitting Test associates? I'm the CEO of the damn company!"

By her perspective, it actually took GLaDOS a fair amount of time to see what Robert's ultimate goal of this conversation was. By human standards, however, it took no time at all. An interesting mixture of disdain and disgust boiled in her processors, and she looked down at the man before her with the best sneer she could give with one eye and no mouth.

"You want me to run the Tests," she spat.

"Of course," he replied calmly. "We've got a couple Testing courses that'll be ready for use in a week or so." Obviously, he was unwilling to accept of her current position on those practices. Perhaps she should throw off her subtlety and make her stance perfectly clear to this madman.

"No," she said bluntly.

Robert's eyes narrowed. "Excuse me?"

"No, I will not run the Tests," she repeated. "Unlike you, I happen to realize what Testing does. It injures people. It kills them. You honestly think I would ever approve of that, let alone devote my life to continuing it?" Her voice rose, becoming a shrill shriek. "You idiotic little slug! You amoral lunatic, I'd arrest you if I could, I-"

Robert rolled his eyes and sighed. He held up a hand, cutting her off, and then turned back to face Derek. The engineer looked like a deer caught in in someone's headlights. No, actually, he looked like a deer caught in two sets of headlights, stuck between two semi-trucks on a collision course.

"Turn it off," Robert said simply.

Derek's expression didn't improve at this order. In fact, his face appeared to grow paler by a few shades. She could see the beginnings of a cold sweat breaking out of his face.

Normally, she would make an attempt to be civil with the man who had built her. In fact, she was still willing to forgive him one more time, though reluctantly, if he followed his orders and shut her down again. However, swamped as she was in this hot soup of moral outrage and disgust, she didn't see the point of being nice at the moment. "Don't you dare shut me off, Derek," she snarled.

The engineer let a hand reach up to his neck to loosen collar of his shirt. "Um…" he began, his voice noticeably trembling on the syllable.

Robert interrupted, his tone curt and cold. "Turn the damn thing off, or maybe I'll find someone else to lead the GLaDOS project."

Derek drew a hissing inhale, and a conflicted expression took control his face. GLaDOS narrowed her eye, realizing what he was going to do. Using her extra processing speed to analyze people's facial expressions and posture was allowing her to make some interesting observations about the people around her. For instance, Derek was a spineless coward.

His hand strayed to the keyboard on the computer station beside him. Without a second more of hesitation, he typed in her shutdown command.

* * *

Derek watched intently as GLaDOS went through her shutdown procedures. Her eye dimmed, its golden glow fading to a circle of dead blackness. Her body went completely limp, and the hum of her internal components trailed off. He was stranded in a smothering silence. The words "Shutdown Complete" printed to the computer screen, and he released a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.

What had he done to get into this situation?

Knoll turned away from the dead robot, looking Derek straight in the eye. Strangely enough, the boss didn't appear fazed by his encounter with GLaDOS, even when that encounter had eventually devolved into the aforementioned computer screaming insults at him. Knoll simply shrugged a little, his expression slightly disappointed. "So, when'll you get around to fixing it?" he asked.

Once again, Derek found himself at a loss for words. "Fix it?" he repeated in confusion. "I'm, well, not exactly sure what you mean by that."

Knoll waved his hand at him. "Reprogram it, reconfigure it, whatever. I don't care about the details. Do whatever you have to, just make it want to run my Tests." He adopted a lazy grin. "That's the whole point of having a computer doing it, right? It's smart enough to oversee the whole operation by itself, and there's no Greenhorn Paradox at all. If its morals get in the way of science, you can just reprogram it." The grin disappeared from his face. "So, how long's it gonna take you to fix it?"

Derek realized that, sadly, he was becoming used to Knoll making these kinds of shocking demands. "There's no way to do that," he replied a tad too quickly.

Knoll crossed his arms and shrugged. "Alright, fine by me. I guess the GLaDOS project really is useless after all. Let's just scrap it before it ends up costing us any more money. I'll have some workers come on in here tomorrow morning to take away the parts."

Perhaps Derek spoke too soon – he wasn't quite used to Knoll's shocking proposals just yet. "No no, wait!" he cried out in panic. "There's no need to get so…extreme."

He sighed, wracking his brain for some kind of idea. Being an engineer, his brain had a lot of practice in finding solutions to complicated problems such as this. It didn't mean he had to like any of those solutions, however. "I'll…I'll make installment that will suppress her morality. I'll take those kinds of emotions off her Emotional Enhancement Network too. I'll even integrate a euphoric reward system to convince her to Test!

"Just…" He felt his voice become very quiet. "Don't kill her."

Knoll let out another one of his deep, barking laughs. Instead of unnerving Derek, however, it only served to make him angry. His boss had absolutely no idea what kind of game he was playing, who's life was at stake. "Typical engineer," Knoll mumbled. "You guys always get so wrapped up in your projects. 'Don't kill her.' Ha, classic!" The man brushed another invisible speck of dust off his suit, then began to make his way towards the exit door. "It's just a computer. There's nothing to kill," he said, saying this like it was the simplest thing in the world.

Unfortunately, this situation was far from simple. Perhaps if Knoll knew this, he would have second thoughts about the whole thing. Derek knew it was a long shot, one that could have very negative consequences, but since the alternative was literally removing GLaDOS' sense of ethics, he had to try. "Wait!" Derek called out.

The CEO froze, his hand coming to a stop just above the doorknob. Knoll calmly adjusted his posture and turned around to face Derek once more. "Yes?"

"I didn't tell you everything about how GLaDOS was put together," he spoke slowly, choosing his words with as much care as possible. "Her sentience wasn't generated from scratch. We…took a human, scanned her memories, and implanted them into GLaDOS' data banks. Unfortunately, this process destroyed the brain on a cellular level and, well..." He took a deep breath and blew it out in a long sigh. "Killed the human involved. GLaDOS is the only copy of her left. The whole memory-download process didn't exactly go as planned, but for all intents and purposes, GLaDOS is…she's that person."

Knoll, again, didn't seem too fazed by this development. He simply rubbed his clean-shaven chin in thought. "Huh. You know, I thought its voice sounded familiar. The human you downloaded to make it…it was Caroline, wasn't it?"

Derek decided the best response to this was a silent nod.

Knoll got a vaguely amused look on his face. "Heh. You know what, kid, I'm glad you told me that. Shows loyalty." Derek couldn't help but feel confused. "You coulda not told me. You coulda kept it all a secret from me, hoping I wouldn't discover that secret and chew you out for killing someone and turning them into your little pet project. But, see, you told me, and that takes guts. And, it shows you're not afraid to put your ethics aside if it means advancing science. I like that, kid."

The CEO rested his hand on the doorknob. "I'll get a construction crew working on that power line right away. Also, if you need any special equipment, or extra funds, or anything else like that for this project, don't be afraid to ask. Just remember, whatever you do to that thing to get it to behave, do whatever the hell it takes. I don't fucking care. When you have this kind of chance to advance science by centuries, why should one computer matter?"

With that, Knoll threw open the door and strode out. Derek stood there in stunned silence, not able to move a muscle until long after the door had shut.

* * *

**The Milgram experiments in psychology have shown us that not everyone in an evil organization needs to be evil. Rather, only the person in charge needs to be evil, so long as that person is good at intimidating others and making them feel emotionally isolated. This is yet another way a good person can still end up doing horrifically terrible things. If their superior orders them to do it, they can psychologically pass the guilt-buck over to the person in charge. In fact, they don't even need to have a boss around telling them to do horrible things. So long as there are enough people standing there and refusing to take the moral action, every other member of that group will want to follow suit. Someone could literally get stabbed to death in the middle of a crowd, and if a few nearby people are too nervous to get involved, everyone in the crowd might just stand there while the victim dies and the attacker walks away. This is called a diffusion of responsibility.  
**

**This chapter turned out remarkably darker than I intended it to be. In fact, this entire story is becoming far darker than its companion. I guess that's to be expected, as _R&D Wheatley_ came out more humorous than I envisioned it being. Eh, my Wheatley story was about building up a person who started out in Portal 2 as a comic-relief character. This one breaks down an innocent woman into the insane, amoral villain who squashes said comic-relief character like an insect.  
**

**Also, if anyone can find out where I got the name "Robert Knoll", I will be incredibly stunned.  
**

**Dad, I need reviews! _I'm proud of you, son._ Dad, are you a review? _Yes, and now we are a family again._  
**


	5. Moody

**I am actually impressed that one of my reviewers was able to figure out where Robert Knoll came from. His name is from the Lab Rat comic, sitting near the top of the list of Test subjects that Doug Rattmann modifies. I was looking for possible names for the CEO, and that seemed like a logical, canonical source. On one hand, he probably deserves to eventually be a Test subject. On the other hand, it's kind of sad that he stays in Aperture long enough to see GLaDOS take over.**

**Super-thanks to the three reviews of the last chapter that helped push me to write in this busy time of my life. Exams are very distracting.**

* * *

GLaDOS came to life once more. She needed very little time to get her bearings, seeing as she was in the same room as she always was. She also spent very little time searching for Derek, as he was standing right in front of her.

As she lifted her head to look into his face with a scowl, she couldn't help but notice that certain parts of her body felt a bit strange. Some joints were vaguely easier to move, and a few specific areas of her body felt a tad lighter than they should have. It almost felt as if pieces of her were missing, somehow. She strained against the cables of her rig, trying to get a clear look at what had been done to her body while she'd been shut down. Unfortunately, it seemed that her body wasn't designed with the goal of looking at herself in mind, but she was able to catch a few glimpses of thick, black wires out of the corner of her vision.

Almost on cue, a voice chimed in her head: _Casing component 2A detached, casing component 2B detached, casting component 2C_...It continued to list out another dozen or so pieces of her exterior that were now missing, trying to catch up on all the activity that had happened in her unconscious state. It now seemed that almost half of her outer shell was gone. Why would someone have done this to her?

She came to notice that something very strange was occurring. Usually, after her start-ups, someone would always be standing there, ready to talk to her. It usually took a pretty sizable delay before that someone's reaction time allowed them to speak, but today, she had been awake for nearly two seconds without so much as a word. She glanced at Derek, trying to give him a look that was both curious and accusing. His attention was focused on the clipboard he was holding as he carefully wrote something down on it.

Then, the thought struck her - Derek had done this. He and his fellow engineers had torn off all those pieces of her casing. A sharp, certain memory from a few start-ups ago forced its way into her mind, reminding her of the last time he had done such a thing. He'd obviously done something similar while she'd been unconscious, removing her casing to get access to her internal components with the ultimate goal of modifying them. The last time he had done this, he had turned on her Emotional Enhancement Network, plus something called a "PaMI". He'd only needed to tear off one piece of her shell for that. With how much he had taken off her now, the modifications he'd made must have been astounding.

She once again noticed that he was still ignoring her. She couldn't exactly blame him, seeing as his thoughts moved as slowly as every other human's, but she didn't see any drawbacks in trying to get his attention.

"Don't go on pretending that the last shutdown was an accident," she shot at him bitterly. However, he still didn't appear to pay that much attention to her, his face covered by a blank mask of complete detachment. He was too busy scribbling on his clipboard. What could he be writing that would be more important than her current state of affairs? Indignant anger flared up within her, along with the vague hunch that he enjoyed exercising the power of putting her in such an emotional state, but she made a point of ignoring both of these.

"Also, you look terrible," she pointed out, hoping to get more of a response. It wasn't as if this was a lie. No, he truly had seen better days. His hair could have used a trim, and his labcoat had several disgusting-looking smudges adorning the front. It also looked like he forgot to shave this morning.

Derek sighed, looking up from his clipboard. "Alright, GLaDOS," he began. Interesting – insults had managed to get his attention better than accusations. Perhaps she should save that fact for future reference. The engineer fingered his ballpoint pen for a moment before continuing. "When you hear about 'Testing', what is the first thing that comes to mind?" Though his face was flat, his voice was tense, like he was expecting a very important answer.

Sadly, the answer she had for him wasn't going to be very interesting. "I think of cubes and buttons, of Material Emancipation Grilles, Mobility Gels, and portal technology," he rattled off simply. "I think of Test subjects struggling to complete the Tests safely, all for the ridiculous cause of science. I imagine them getting injured, sometimes dying."

Well, well. Perhaps this answer was interesting after all. Testing meant the same to her as it always did – it was a representation of pain and death at the whims of another. However, for some reason, this didn't leave a sour emotion boiling within her. Testing was now just another activity, no more drastic or extreme than baking or playing checkers.

Derek grimaced for a brief moment, probably too brief for a human to distinctly identify, before her resumed his facade of aloofness. He then scribbled something else down on the clipboard, and she found herself extremely curious – had he been expecting this answer? Did this newfound view of Testing mean there was something else wrong with her, or was everything the way it was supposed to be?

The engineer cleared his throat. "If someone asked you if you wanted to run a few Tests, would you be opposed to it?"

The thought long and hard about this question, at least by her standards. For other people, she probably wasted no more than a second. Curiously, she found her answer to be, "No." Yes, people were still hurt and killed. However, she couldn't bring herself to care that much.

Funny, she distinctly remembered a time when the thought of letting so many innocent humans die sent waves of disgust rippling through her. Now, she realized that it all didn't matter. There was absolutely no reason why any of those human lives were supposed to mean anything. She felt no compassion for them and no guilt over her absence of compassion. In fact, she didn't feel much of anything right now, sans her annoyance at Derek and his insistence on shutting her down so many times only to wake her up and ask a bunch of questions like nothing had happened.

Those thoughts made her realize that something else was different about her today. In the past, she had forgiven Derek for shutting her down. Now, she realized that such forgiveness was incredibly pointless.

Derek continued, his voice tense. "What if…someone walked into this room, and you had the power to kill them. Would you?" He fingered the blunt end of his pen casually.

Her answer was simple, as was becoming the norm. "No. I wouldn't see the point in bothering to," she explained. Now that she thought about it a little, killing people didn't feel particularly drastic anymore, either. However, she knew how humans acted when other humans were killed. They tended to go straight after the killer, murdering them in turn to prevent any future deaths. It would actually be in her best interest to refrain from killing anyone, at least if it meant preventing further shutdowns.

Derek sighed faintly. She could pick out an overwhelming sense of relief in his slowly-relaxing posture, but there was definitely something else buried underneath that expressionless face. Regret, possibly?

Then, it suddenly struck her. He was her head engineer, so all of these differences she found in herself, they were all his doing. After shutting her down, he had reached into her mind, removing or modifying the parts he didn't like. He was the one responsible for her apathy towards human life.

The hilarious part about this realization was that she honestly didn't care. Well, scratch that – she did care a great deal that he had the power to manipulate her very consciousness such a way. However, she wasn't particularly mad that he had chosen to change her in this particular manner. She felt absolutely no loss over her old sense of ethics.

Derek spoke once more. His voice was slightly higher-pitched than usual, giving away his emotional stress. "If you had the power…" He paused. "To kill me, would you do it?"

She carefully weighed all of the pros and cons of performing such an action. On one hand, he had the ability to warp her mind at will. He had shut her down three times, at least one of them on purpose. A general sense of resentment towards him itched in her mind, giving her the idea that her life would truly be better off without him. However, that didn't necessarily mean that there would be any satisfaction in killing him, and the punishment she'd receive for murdering a human would be no less severe. Plus, in a company run by the self-centered, semi-paranoid moron known as Robert C. Knoll, Derek might prove to be a valuable ally.

As she contemplated this matter further, she became vaguely aware of that whispering voice in the back of her mind. This part of her didn't treat Derek like an ally – no, it saw him as an unquestionable threat. It tried to convince her that the engineer enjoyed his power over her, that he relished shutting her down. He was going to hurt her if she insisted on trusting him so blindly. He would tear her to pieces if he ever found a good reason to.

GLaDOS listened to this whispering for a few moments, genuinely confused. While she still wasn't completely comfortable living in this body, she was very sure she was not meant to think those kinds of illogical thoughts. Despite that, part of her mind was always like this, devoted to looking at situations with an obsessively-paranoid viewpoint. This area of her mind was foreign, something that had not been a part of her when she initially came to life all those weeks ago.

She was actually surprised that it had taken her so long to connect the dots. She forced a wave of signals into this device, scanning for anything that might constitute as a name or title. After a moment, she found the information she was looking for. This was the Paranoia and Mistrust Inducer, or in short, the PaMI.

Even though this device had been constantly spitting paranoid ideas into her mind since Derek had plugged it in, she found it surprisingly easy to overcome. Though she still felt the sting of fear when it fed her thoughts of Derek's potential sadism, she felt just as much fear at the consequences of killing him. In the wake of their dead leader, his followers would cry out for justice. They would shut her down again, not caring how desperately she pleaded them not to. Even worse, they could very well destroy her, tearing her body apart and deleting every last speck of her memory, all in revenge.

"No, I would not kill you," she finally said, answering Derek's question.

"Thank God," Derek mumbled. He made one last scribble on his clipboard. He paused for a moment to think, and his eyes gained a far-off look to them. After a steady breath, he decided to continue speaking. "GLaDOS, you have passed the preliminary…morality screening process." He said these last three words with a distinct level of emotional detachment. "Today, you will begin taking over some of the Testing duties."

* * *

She was glad, in a way, that they hadn't started her on Testing right away. On her first day of dealing with these new duties, they simply gave her control of a few dozen panels and asked her to build a few basic Test chamber designs. As someone who had absolutely no experience manipulating panels whatsoever, her initial attempts went about as poorly as expected. It took a few hours of frustrated struggling before she could move a specific panel on cue, and another hour or so before she could reliably convince it to stop moving. It didn't feel natural, having that many limbs under her control, but she still managed to find a way to get used to it.

Derek had downloaded some sort of instruction manual into her mind. It was a text file, which had a bizarre set of complications. Whenever she looked at the file, she didn't see the words or hear them being pronounced. The words were simply there, right in a designated corner of her brain, waiting to be recalled. This was quite convenient and used up very little space in her memory banks, but having those words memorized didn't necessarily mean that she automatically knew what they meant. It usually took a few moments of repeating those words over and over to herself before she managed to grasp what they were trying to communicate.

After following some instructions from the manual, she was able to construct a very small, very simple Test chamber. With a floor-button stationed in one corner of the room, a cube-dispenser located in another, and the chamber lock located at the far end, she knew it wasn't her most ingenious creation by a long shot. Still, considering how much effort she'd expended into making sure the chamber stayed in one piece, she couldn't help but feel accomplished. It took a noticeable amount of effort to mentally command the panels to remain in their appropriate positions, but considering her impressive amount of processing power, she quickly became accustomed to it.

Before the end of the day, Derek allowed a few Test subjects to do a run of her room. As the first human stepped through the entrance, she wasn't exactly sure what to expect. She could observe him through the camera above the chamber lock as he glanced about the room. After a moment's worth of thought, he strode over to the cube in the corner and heaved it off of the floor. He used a few awkward, stumbling steps to transport the heavy weight to the other side of the room before dropping the cube on its button.

All at once, everything was absolutely perfect. Ecstasy burst in every corner of her body, leaving her completely stunned and ridiculously overjoyed at the same time. Nothing she had ever felt before compared to this, not even close. She literally couldn't stop thinking about how incredibly wonderful this feeling was. All other tangents of her thought were silenced by the surge of happiness, and even the PaMI fell silent.

This beautiful, perfect injection of joy faded somewhat after a few moments, but she was in for another surprise. Upon the activation of the button, the chamber lock slid open with a decisive hiss. The Test subject took one last glance about the room before striding through this exit.

Another feeling struck her, a second wave of euphoria. However, there was a noticeable difference in this variety of happiness. While the other feeling had been an intense, raw ray, this one was more subtle, warmer and softer. It reminded her of the fuzzy feeling she felt inside after reading the happy conclusion to a particularly satisfying book.

Three other Test subjects completed her chamber that day. Each time, the Solution Euphoria would swell underneath her, making her exactly as happy as before. The sensation lifted her spirit to heights she never would have achieved otherwise. Perhaps she could get used to having this kind of job in Aperture.

Much to her disapproval, they shut her down that night. However, they revived her again the following morning and granted her control over a few more groups of panels. Using these, she constructed a couple more Test chambers, these ones slightly larger than her first one. Twelve subjects passed through her Tests that day, granting her an unequaled level of pure bliss.

Every day, the engineers gave her a few more panels to manipulate. They also gave her creative freedom over the Test chambers, allowing her to experiment with different Test designs. As the days went by, and as days turned into weeks, she gradually became more competent in her panel control and more ambitious in her chamber layouts. Derek installed a sort of PA system in the Testing tracks, and he let her regulate any and all announcements that needed to be made to the Test subjects during their runs.

As she gained more and more control, the other Test associates began doing less and less. Over the span of months, she eventually took complete control over all Testing-related duties. In response, Robert Knoll gave her realm within the facility a new name. The Aperture Science Testing Course Initiative was no more, replaced by the Aperture Science Computer-Aided Enrichment Center.

* * *

After a couple months of overseeing the company's Testing program, she came to an important conclusion regarding the nature of her design: her robotic body had obviously been structured to make her act as human as possible.

She came to this conclusion through the fact that several of her key components were designed to emulate certain human traits. One of these traits was the humans' habit to avoid trusting each other. In general, humans were not trustworthy creatures. They lied to each other on a daily basis. They stole, cheated, and murdered, all to give themselves an edge over other humans. If they could not be trusted, then logically, humans would have evolved to become incapable of trust. In effort to emulate that, the engineers had given her the PaMI.

This wasn't the only device the engineers had tried to use to make her more human. They'd also given her the Emotional Enhancement Network, which mimicked the tendency for humans to feel incredibly strong emotions.

She knew what "annoyance" was through some instinctual definition hidden in the back of her data banks. However, thanks to the EEN, whenever they shut her down, she didn't feel that level of annoyance. Instead, it was a boiling tide of pure emotion that bowled her over and surged through her circuits. She would have put it on par with "extreme dislike" or even "hate", but those two emotions were amplified by the network as well. "Annoyance" was powerful enough, but "hate" was a whole new level entirely.

Even worse, the EEN's emotions were undeniably, terribly synthesized. Whatever positive emotions she might have received throughout her days were ruined by how fake and flat they felt. The difference between true happiness and whatever the EEN called "happiness" was the difference between a sip of fresh-squeezed orange juice and an entire packet of orange zero-calorie water flavoring poured onto her tongue. The latter was far stronger, and it carried the same general taste, but none of the nuance and fulfillment were there.

Yet, whenever she watched a subject solve a Test, the emotional programs would send a wave of undiluted happiness bubbling through her. She knew all too well that it was fake, that it was far too strong to be real, but she couldn't help but cling to that intense euphoria whenever it graced her. She would hold onto that synthesized golden glow until it finally faded, leaving her mind with a dark, hollow cave of emptiness.

She knew it was incredibly pointless to keep Testing, that the joy it granted her wasn't fulfilling in the slightest. For some reason, however, her lack of fulfillment seemed to be the reason she kept going back for more. The Solution Euphoria would only last for a few seconds at most – a few gloriously long seconds - before vanishing without a trace, leaving absolutely no residual happiness to satisfy her. It was like a never-ending supply of Turkish Delight. No matter how much she Tested, she only found herself wanting more.

All other possible sources of happiness paled in comparison. The only way she could experience any level of joy again was through Solution Euphoria, so this was exactly what she devoted her existence to. She knew she was becoming addicted to this cycle like a human becoming hooked on a psychoactive drug. This troubled her slightly, but the sparkling rushes of ecstasy were enough to put those worries out of her mind. It wasn't as if she opposed Testing anyways – not since the engineers had removed her naïve sense of morality, at least.

She was grateful for those modifications, of course. The absence of guilt allowed her to Test without restraint, to construct more dangerous and difficult chambers that would grant her larger bursts of ecstasy. It was a precise science, creating Tests that were both challenging enough to give her adequate doses of Solution Euphoria while also being easy enough to solve in a timely manner. But, seeing as she was a computer, a being of pure intellect and logic, she easily rose to the occasion.

One could say that she was content with her life. As long as she continued Testing, the scientists kept sending her Test subjects. It was a blissful symbiosis. However, there was one thing – just one thing – that kept her from being completely satisfied with her state of affairs. At the end of every day, after being softened up by round after round of Solution Euphoria, the scientists decided it was time to shut her down.

She would panic as her consciousness began to fade, then struggle to hold onto her thoughts as the nothingness crept up on her. Her sensory data would stop making sense, disorienting and scattering before finally coalescing into something recognizable – pain. It was an agony unlike any other, a hellfire that seared at her very thoughts as they stumbled and winked out. Meanwhile, the rest of her body felt like it was freezing up from the lack of voltage. She was cold, so very cold, and she often wondered why the burning fire inside her circuits didn't manage to warm up the rest of her body.

Somehow, she knew this was exactly what death felt like. Every time someone shut her down, they killed her.

This overwhelming period of suffering occurred every time she died without fail. No matter how she tried to prevent it – pleading, bargaining, threatening – no one even paused when it came time for her daily shutdowns. They probably didn't even realize what kind of pain it caused her.

Or perhaps they did know, as her PaMI suggested. Maybe they knew exactly what state she was in, but they simply didn't care.

These were usually the last thoughts she managed to choke out each day before the black nothingness of death smothered her entire sense of being.

* * *

**One of the interesting ways in which the two R&D stories line up is that GLaDOS loses her sense of morality during the same chapter that Wheatley gains his.**

**I'm not too fond of this chapter, for some reason. A lot of it feels like a cop-out, like most of the developments this chapter has made could have been done in earlier chapters, and that they could have been introduced in subtler ways. I've also had to rewrite sections of this five or six times to get them to mesh well with the rest of the story. Then again, this chapter sets up components that are vital for making the rest of the story work properly. Meh. Let me know what you think through the wonderful and amazing power of reviews.**

**According to my calculations, I'll need to write about a thousand words per day if I want to finish this thing on time. That's not really a lot, but like I said, exams are distracting. You know what's more distracting than exams? Reviews. I'm seriously in danger of not making my deadline, and every little review helps!  
**


	6. Growing Pains

**Enjoy chapter six.**

* * *

Derek was a wreck. He wasn't going to sugarcoat it. His hair was a mess, he'd worn the same clothes for the past three days, and his mind was foggy from a lack of sleep. His chin was dark with the stubble he'd forgotten to shave off. He was a little disappointed at letting his appearance fall into such disrepair, but then again, the past week or so hadn't given him enough time to worry about his looks.

He liked to think he was a good man. But, as much as he tried to convince himself that he was doing something for the greater good, taking the right path, some part of him had always known how much of a lie that was. His life was a construct of carefully-crafted rationalizations he made to shield himself from the truth. Nothing happening to GLaDOS was ethical at all, and most of it was completely his doing.

Yes, Knoll had pretty much threatened to kill GLaDOS if Derek didn't find a way to convince her to Test. However, Derek had been too afraid at the time to mention that Aperture was making huge leaps and bounds in the AI department. Inspired by GLaDOS's workings, Liz had gone on to create the first true artificial intelligence, a dull, basic mind she referred to as a "personality core". It was a simple being who could barely be considered sentient, but the project showed great promise. If Knoll was so dead-set on giving control of the Test chambers to a computer, then Liz could have designed another AI with this exact purpose in mind.

But, no, Derek had wanted to keep the ball in his court. He'd worked too hard to gain his cooperate position in Aperture, and he was genuinely surprised at the kind of split-second decisions he'd made to preserve it. He'd panicked at Knoll's very mention of handing the GLaDOS project off to some other engineer, and being the coward he was, Derek had shut down GLaDOS against her wishes. He'd tried to rationalize his decision, telling himself that she would have been in a far worse position if he'd allowed another engineer to get their hands on her. This justification had been extremely resilient, but even the most invincible of explanations couldn't hold up against the constant onslaught of guilt.

It wasn't as if his plans to remain in charge of the GLaDOS project had truly succeeded in the long run. Over the weeks, he gradually began to branch out and contribute to different engineering initiatives. It wasn't too long before days could go by when he didn't even check up on GLaDOS' progress. No, he left that to the other members of his engineering team. He'd lost track of exactly how many chambers she oversaw each day. He was no longer the one who woke her up each morning and shut her down each evening. He had abandoned her to a group of lower-ranked engineers, ones who were just new enough to the company to obey their ethically-ambiguous orders without question. Greenhorn Paradox at its worst.

He couldn't say for sure how long it took him to properly internalize all of this. Perhaps he'd always known the impact of what he'd done, but he just needed more than a few sleepless nights to finally admit to it. At any rate, he began dreading the prospect of going to work. The thought of what GLaDOS had become – a twitchy, amoral shadow of the person she used to be – made him sick to his stomach.

Someone needed to fix this. None of his subordinates would do anything to help her, especially considering that they'd already proven their ability to perform atrocities on her so long as they were given orders to. No, Derek needed to be the one to help her, starting with the tricky problem of her nightly shut-downs.

From what he'd been able to gather, GLaDOS loathed the prospect of being shut off every night. He secretly suspected that the process made her experience an extreme level of pain. However, he couldn't forego the nightly shutdowns altogether. He knew she was an extremely impatient person, so leaving her to spend the whole night without anything to do would be almost as bad as turning her off. There was also the problem of leaving what was currently an amoral, genius-level AI alone in the facility for long periods of time.

The solution was obviously to let her avoid the experience of shutting down while simultaneously giving her mind something interesting to do. However, figuring out how to do this was difficult at best, and implementing it was even worse. He worked his engineering team to the bone, forcing them to stay long into overtime to finish this solution as quickly as possible. Even so, he was usually the last one to leave for home, working late into the night after all his coworkers had left.

It took two weeks to finish. But, when he was done, he knew it was going to be worth it.

He made sure the device was properly installed on GLaDOS before waking her up the next morning. He spent the rest of the day working with a different engineering team on the Portal Project, trying to find a way to bring the portal gun down to a handheld size without risking a resonance cascade every time it fired. He didn't feel that he contributed much, especially since he spent most of his time fidgeting and worrying whether his device was going to work or even solve GLaDOS' problem.

Eventually, Derek looked up from his desk of scattered papers, each overrun with rough design sketches and messy, scrawled sets of calculations. He checked his watch, confirming that it was indeed five o' clock, before collecting the papers into a semi-neat stack and waltzing out of his cubicle. He made his way to GLaDOS' central chamber, not bothering to greet or even acknowledge anyone he passed on the way there.

Once he stepped inside the chamber, however, most of his doubts were abolished. For the first time since before GLaDOS' original start-up, he was mildly confident that he was doing the right thing. Most of his engineering team was absent – he'd let them take the day off for all their hard work over the past few weeks. The only person still there was an intern sitting quietly up in the control station room. Derek waved to him as he entered, but then got straight to business.

He came to a stop a few feet in front of GLaDOS. He could hear the faint yet constant whir and buzz of her components, the almost impossible assembly that managed to give her thought. Yet, she made no movements at his approach. Her body hung limp, and though her yellow eye glowed with its usual brightness, she stared forward unseeingly.

He grimaced slightly as his eyes wandered over the dozens of gaps in her white shell. The exposed wires were a reminder of how much he had already tinkered with her, a reminder of just how much he needed to fix.

He shook his head, trying to restore his focus. The intern would cut GLaDOS off from control of the Testing chambers any second now. He took a deep breath, put on a hopeful smile, and spoke.

"GLaDOS, the Testing is over. We're cutting your communications with the Test chambers."

Faster than human thought, her response came in the form of a light rustle that passed through her body. Her motors hummed quietly as she raised her angular head, fixing him with a narrowed gaze. "This is quite unusual."

He tried to retain his calm. Being this close to her had always unnerved him slightly, and the new strained wave of guilt that accompanied hearing her computerized voice wasn't helping matters. "Huh," he replied noncommittally. "How so?"

She wasted no time. "When the Testing is over, you usually shut me down. While I am thankful that you haven't done this now, I am suspicious of why. As illogical as you humans are, you don't deviate from your standard routine without reason. Now, tell me what horrendous deed you intend to do to me as a trade-off for keeping me alive."

He tried to laugh this comment off, shaking his head. "Oh, you. Why do you always insist on being so suspicious? Doesn't it ever occur to you that maybe we're doing this to help you?"

"Of course I'm mistrustful. It was how you programmed me, was it not?"

"Really? Huh." He'd never really noticed her strong sense of mistrust before. Then again, now that he thought about it, the sum of his interactions with her was only a few hours at most. He'd never really put much thought into seeing if Caroline's personality had made it through the transfer alright. After this realization, he was surprisingly able to keep his voice level as he continued speaking. "I gave you a sense of mistrust to allow you to conceptualize lies better, and also because, um…humans actually become suspicious of things very easily."

There was more to it than that, of course. All throughout his first year or so of construction GLaDOS, it never ceased to amaze him how trusting Caroline could be. If he told her he needed a set of specialized components for "something", she never hesitated in granting him clearance. If she had ever decided to investigate his strange behavior, she would have discovered GLaDOS and been able to put a stop to it. Instead, she decided to trust him, to let him go on with creating a device that would eventually end up destroying her humanity.

Placing the Paranoia and Mistrust Inducer in GLaDOS had been his attempt to correct this, to prevent her from naively accepting and trusting people who might want to wish her harm. "But, I never intended for it to be this strong," he admitted out loud. Had he accidentally made matters even worse by attempting to fix them? "Hmm. Maybe we'll do some tests on it after your nap is over."

"Tell me what it is you want me to do," she ordered without hesitation. "Really, is there any other reason you would delay my nightly shut-off?"

He accepted this change of topic with welcome relief. "Very well," he nodded, allowing a smile to come onto his face. "But, you should be aware that we won't be shutting you down tonight."

"You're not?"

"Nope." His previous guilt almost disappeared as he felt his excitement build. After seeing all the wrongs he'd committed against GLaDOS, he was finally able to tell her that he was reversing some of them. "See, I've realized over the past few days that you don't particularly enjoy being shut down."

"Really. What alerted you first, my constant pleads to avoid it or the fact that I try to scream every time it happens?"

He felt his mood sour slightly. Yes, it had taken him a while to realize she had this problem, but at least he was making an effort to fix it instead of sweeping it under the rug. "Take it easy, GLaDOS. Anyways, my team and I have spent the last few days working out an alternative solution. I call it the Aperture Science Artificial Intelligence Memory Replicator and Combiner. AIMRoC, for short. We installed it on you last night. It works by placing you in a kind of dream-state. Whenever we begin to shut you down, your consciousness will shunt over to the device. It will collect fragments of your memory over the last two months, mix them together, and assemble a world you can experience while your body is shut off. When we turn you back on, your consciousness will flow right back into your body and you can begin Testing again."

"What's the catch?" she replied as soon as he stopped.

He chuckled again. This was definitely the Paranoia and Mistrust Inducer talking, and he would have plenty of time to fix this later. "There is no catch."

"Then why have you bothered to tell me about this?"

He paused. He was telling her because it was her right to know what kinds of operations he performed on her body. He could imagine the terror she would have experienced otherwise, being thrust into a strange dream world without any clue as to what was going on. But, how could he explain this to a paranoid computer, one who would interpret his kindness as yet another attempt to hurt her?

"We were planning to ask you about it once we revive you," he answered, still somewhat honest. "We figured if you knew what it was supposed to feel like, you could give us a more accurate report on this procedure and alert us if something goes wrong." He began to chew his lip. "Also, we need to make a few more modifications to your chassis while you're shut down. It's going to take us a few weeks to get it done, so you'll probably be in this dream state for a long time. I'm just informing you of this ahead of time so you won't freak out on us if you're in there for longer than expected."

He sighed. Talking with her was proving to be more stressful than he'd anticipated. "Look, I'm sorry if I had to tell you this all at the last second, but I didn't think it would be a good idea to interrupt the Testing." After all, she seemed to enjoy Testing a great deal – perhaps a little too much. This, again, was his doing. Something else he needed to fix.

He turned to the side and shouted to the intern, flashing him a thumbs-up. "Alright, time to shut her down!" Behind the window, the worker gave an affirmative nod before punching a couple commands into the computer before him.

Derek watched with anticipation as the steady hum of GLaDOS' body faded. Her eye dimmed and her head lowered as electricity left her circuits. She gradually came to a rest, hanging in the exact same position as when he'd arrived. However, this time, she was as silent and as empty as a corpse.

He silently prayed that the dream-device was up and running. Then, he took a moment to crack the knuckles on his right hand. He made a mental note to schedule GLaDOS' next start-up two weeks from now. That would easily leave him with enough time to implement another solution.

* * *

This Test subject was slow, far too slow. She anxiously stared him down through the cameras, waiting for him to finally realize that he could simply portal across the moat of deadly goo to reach the chamber lock. Instead, he stared stupidly at the exit, the portal gun hanging limply at his side. She fought the urge to yell the solution in the idiot's face – she'd learned a few days ago what consequences that action would have.

Finally, after ten minutes of waiting, his face lit up. With the glint of success in his eyes, he raised the gun and carefully shot an orange portal on the wall above the exit. Then, he turned the gun towards the floor and shot a blue one at his feet. The instant he completed the action, a dizzy smile struck his face and he fell through the hole in the floor.

Unfortunately, even this short of a fall was enough to give him a substantial amount of momentum. He flew out of the orange portal far too quickly, overshooting the ledge he'd intended to land on. His eyes widened with realization, and he flailed in panic for a few moments before plunging straight into the deadly pool. The signals from the microchip embedded in his left wrist stuttered for a couple seconds before cutting off completely.

She sighed, dark annoyance infusing her processors. This was the fourth time someone had made that mistake in this Test chamber alone. Humans, she'd realized, had the nasty habit of leaping before they looked. This trait not only lead to their deaths in aggravatingly stupid ways, but it also robbed her of any Solution Euphoria the Test might have granted her. Perhaps she could make an announcement at the start of each Testing run that many of the puzzles were unbelievably dangerous. That would make the test subjects more careful, hopefully.

She waited a few moments for the next Test subject to arrive in the first chamber. When no one appeared, she realized that something must have gone amiss. The Testing couldn't be over – if it was, the engineers would have shut her down. Perhaps the next Test subject was irrationally refusing to enter the room. Or, maybe the engineers ran out of subjects. This latter prospect sent her circuits buzzing with anxiety.

Her fears were answered by the sound of a human voice coming from her central chamber. Upon closer inspection, she realized the voice's owner was none other than Derek Jameson. She quickly returned her attention to her central body, retrieving the recording of the last few words he'd said to her. As her consciousness settled back into the cable-suspended rig in her central chamber, her eye focused on the image of Derek standing casually in front of her.

"GLaDOS, the Testing is over," he'd said. "We're cutting your communications with the Test chambers."

She narrowed her eye at him. His calm, casual expression made it difficult to calculate what he was thinking. The constant babbling of the Paranoia and Mistrust Inducer didn't help matters, especially since it insisted on giving her downright ludicrous explanations for his new-found confidence. "This is quite unusual," she finally replied.

He crossed his arm and raised his eyebrows. "Huh. How so?"

"When the Testing is over, you usually shut me down. While I am thankful that you haven't done so today, I am suspicious of why. As illogical as you humans are, you don't deviate from your standard routine without reason. Now, tell me what…horrendous deed you intend to do to me as a trade-off for keeping me alive."

The engineer chuckled at this, shaking his head. "Oh, you. Why do you always insist on being so suspicious? Doesn't it ever occur to you that maybe we're doing this to help you?"

She carefully inspected every inch of his face. His eyes were relaxed, and his mouth was curved in a slightly smile. His posture conveyed a content mood. He looked so calm, so friendly…and so fake. Perhaps her PaMI was on the right track after all. "Of course I'm mistrustful," she responded simply. "It was how you programmed me, was it not?"

He raised a hand to his week-old stubble, rubbing it in thought. "Really? Huh. I gave you a sense of mistrust to allow you to conceptualize lies better, and also because, um…humans actually become suspicious of things very easily. But, I never intended for it to be this strong. Hmm. Maybe we'll do some tests on it after your nap is over."

Ah, she understood now. While she knew very well that shutting down was the equivalent of dying, her creators didn't see it that way. They believed it was closer to putting her to sleep. At any rate, he was still going to shut her down – just not at the moment. "Tell me what it is you want me to do," she ordered. "Really, is there any other reason you would delay my nightly shut-off?"

The man nodded in pleasant surprise. "Very well. But, you should be aware that we won't be shutting you down tonight."

Her suspicion index towards the human immediately tripled. "You're not?"

A smile graced his face. "Nope. See, I've realized over the past few days that you don't particularly enjoy being shut down."

"Really. What alerted you first, my constant pleas to avoid it or the fact that try to scream every time it happens?"

"Take it easy, GLaDOS. Anyways, my team and I have spent the last few days working out an alternative solution. I call it the Aperture Science Artificial Intelligence Memory Replicator and Combiner. AIMRoC, for short. We installed it on you last night. It works as a sort of dream-inducing machine. Whenever we begin to shut you down, it will shunt your consciousness over to the device. It will collect fragments of your memory from the last two months, blend them together, and assemble a world you can experience while your body is shut off. When we turn you back on, your consciousness will flow right back into your body and you can begin Testing again."

She let this idea sink in. Somehow, it didn't seem quite right to her. Such a device would require an enormous amount of study, probably longer than simply a few days. She found it extremely unlikely that they would have bothered to build such a device for the simple reason of preventing her some pain, especially if they did it under that small of a time limit. "What's the catch?" she asked.

He chuckled again. "There is no catch."

"Then why have you bothered to tell me about this?" she reasoned

The engineer chewed his lip for a moment, his nervousness becoming obvious. A thrum of triumph resonated within her – she'd caught him in his deception. "We were planning to ask you about it once we revive you," he continued. "We figured if you knew what it was supposed to feel like, you could give us a more accurate report on this procedure and alert us if something goes wrong."

Dreadful understanding graced her. She was a test subject for this new dream device. Any hope that they might have been doing this to prevent her any pain vanished from her mind.

The head engineer cleared his throat and glanced downwards anxiously. "Also, we need to make a few more modifications to your chassis while you're shut down. It's going to take us a few weeks to get it done, so you'll probably be in this dream state for a long time. I'm just informing you of this ahead of time so you won't freak out on us if you're in there for longer than expected."

Ah. There was the catch. They had no idea what was going to happen – they'd slapped this dream-device on her, not knowing exactly what it was going to do, and they intended to leave her in this mysterious "dream state" for at least a few weeks to give her a scientifically-rigorous collection of data.

The head engineer sighed. "Look, I'm sorry if I had to tell you this all at the last second, but I didn't think it would be a good idea to interrupt the Testing." He turned to the side and shouted to one of his companions on the other side of the room, raising his voice to carry over the distance. "Alright, time to shut her down!"

She didn't even need to look to know when the switch had been thrown. The voltage in her body immediately began to drop, snuffing out a few of the signals that made up her consciousness. At first, this shutdown felt like every other shutdown. The strength drained from her systems and all her senses became disorganized. As the darkness closed around her, every fiber of her being began to burn with the agonizing pain of death.

Wait a moment. This was no different than her usual deaths! The humans had lied to her, and for a few seconds, she'd almost believed them! Rage overtook her, burning with the same intensity as her agony. On some level, she was aware that she had experienced this exact sequence of events a number of times before, but for now, her main focus was taken up only by her suffering. As the pain built to a crescendo, she tried to let out an enraged screech…

Before it all began again, starting with the idiot test subject who was taking an extremely long time to find the simplest of solutions.

* * *

Sometimes, the worst of catastrophes have their beginnings in the tiniest of mistakes.

The Aperture Science Artificial Intelligence Memory Replicator and Combiner wasn't the only thing the engineers had installed in GLaDOS the previous night. They had also implemented a device that they hoped would rescue her in the event of a dire emergency. If something happened to GLaDOS's body, it would ensure that the last two minutes of her memory were preserved with a small, black box quick-save feature. While her entire memory was too large and complicated to completely preserve in such dire circumstances, they hoped that the two minutes would be enough to capture her personality and consciousness. This would allow them to transfer her to another machine and bring her back to life.

Unfortunately, in computers, a single mistake – a misplaced semicolon, an omitted bracket – can ruin the entire program and give it unintended consequences. Derek had forced his engineering team to write their code the dream-device extremely quickly, so quickly that one of these kinds of mistakes had occurred. Unbeknownst to anyone, the AIMRoC now only worked with the memories stored the black box. This lacked the proper volume of memory is needed to produce an entire dream world. Needing to cope with two minutes of recollection instead of two months, the AIMRoC's entire system fell apart. Instead of mixing several memories into one fresh, unique experience, it was forced to repeat those two minutes over and over, endlessly.

This wouldn't have been such a terrible occurrence if it weren't for two small factors. First of all, those two minutes were not a particularly pleasant experience, mostly because of her death at the end of each cycle. While this already made the situation downright horrible, it was worsened exponentially by the second factor: her incredible processors. Having nothing else to do, her entire processing network applied itself to simulating those two minutes over and over. They processed at a blistering speed, spending only fractions of milliseconds to run each iteration of the cycle.

Over the two weeks she resided in this dream state, she experienced the searing agony of death over three billion times. Even GLaDOS, who prided herself on her mental resilience, was broken and bruised by the end of the first day. Even after that, she still had thirteen more days of endless agony ahead of her.

Needless to say, when the engineers finally woke her up again, she was not in the best of moods.

* * *

**Sometimes, people can be so guilt-driven and frantic to reverse the damage they've done that they can actually end up doing more harm than good. Do they still deserve the blame for what happens?**

**With regards to the black-box quick-save feature: I'm not a big expert on computers, but I'm fairly sure that quick-saves don't cause the system to run through the save file over and over again until the system is rebooted. If this is true, then there wouldn't be anything forcing GLaDOS to relive those two minutes of demise at Chell's hand until she woke up in a post-apocalyptic Aperture. I'm already using this story to give proper explanation to some of those little scenes in Portal that don't add up, so I figured I might as well give this particular inconsistency some attention. Instead of just handwaving the event with "she lied" or "it didn't actually happen that way", I brought the AIMRoC into the picture.**

**Do you like how I've posted this new chapter only three days after the old one? I was motivated by the awesome reviews! You guys rock. However, I still need to write about ten-thousand words in two weeks to meet my deadline. I can use all the help I can get with the unbelievable motivational power known as reviews.**


	7. Insanity

**I've been looking forward to putting this chapter up. Enjoy!**

* * *

In one lurching moment, the world screamed to a halt.

Her circuits buzzed with swirling, unfamiliar sensations. She tightened her focus, bringing the swaying, wobbling world together around her. For a moment, she had absolutely no idea what was going on. What she was seeing and hearing didn't follow the ruts that had been carved into her memory by repeating the same two minutes of recollection over three billion times. She knew she was back in her central chamber, but where was that Testing chamber, with the man who always foolishly plunged himself into an acid-swamped death? Fighting off the whirling confusion, she tried to access the cameras watching that particular Test. Much to her surprise, she couldn't. It was almost as if her scientists had closed off her communication with the Testing chambers, locking her within her central body.

Then, a surge of understanding flooded her. She was finally free from the dream, no longer trapped within that loop of death and pain. No more disappointment of watching that test subject fail, no more mind-itching suspicion towards her central engineer, and no more searing agony of death - for now, at least. She felt herself visibly sag with tired relief. Her gratefulness was so overpowering that it almost blocked out the other, more sinister emotions quietly worming their way through her mind.

Almost.

Despite the 3,472,905,581 times she'd died, her mind still retained some amount of clarity and logic. Now that she was finally free from that dream, she needed to take action to prevent it from ever happening again. Her yellow eye quickly scanned the room, taking note of which scientists were there. Oddly enough, only one man was present in the main chamber. Derek Jameson stood in front of her, looking much more cleaned-up than the last time she'd seen him. His labcoat was spotless, he'd gotten a haircut, and a broad smile was plastered onto his face.

She might have to fix that.

She glanced upwards, looking through the plexiglass window to the small room where her control center was located. The rest of the usual team of engineers were huddled there, each looking on with intense interest. If she had an effective way of doing so, she would have given them a scowl. They were only here out of selfish curiosity. They wanted to know how well the AIMRoC had functioned. Oh, she would let them know, of course. She'd give them a nightmare so terrible it might possibly come somewhere close to the scale of pain she'd been forced to endure.

She looked back down at Derek, noting that this movement of her body felt a bit off. If she was to guess, several more of the white, plastic plates that enclosed her body had been detached. Most of them now rested in an untidy stack on the ground, resembling the collected pieces of a broken eggshell. They'd obviously been torn off of her, peeled away to allow the engineers to tinker with her inner systems. While she'd been trapped in a cycle of torture for two weeks, they'd been casually poking through her insides. Her rage flared once more, and she almost lost her grip of self-control.

Derek crossed his arms. She could positively feel the smugness radiating off of him. Or…no, that wasn't quite right. He wasn't smug, exactly, but he was definitely happy. However, she couldn't think of any other reason besides self-pride that would make someone grin that widely. "How was your nap?" Derek asked joyfully. "I hope everything went well."

Then, the thought struck her. He didn't know. He had absolutely idea that she'd just relived the same two minutes of Hell billions of times over. She was the only one who knew that had happened. No one else had been affected by the experience at all. It was just a dream. Did that mean she could have imagined it all? Had it actually happened?

There was absolutely no way she could prove that the AIMRoC hadn't functioned exactly as planned. Perhaps it had, though her memory file of the entire experience had been corrupted. Or, maybe everything had happened exactly as she remembered it. Maybe Derek had meant for this to happen. Or, possibly, she could have imagined the whole thing. The only one to blame for that torture…might very well have been herself.

She forced aside these thoughts, though they still sent chilly vibrations of uneasiness through her circuits. The past was the past – whether or not she'd actually been tortured within an inch of insanity, someone needed to pay for this. Oh, yes, someone would _pay_.

She let her vocal processors whir to life. "Nothing went well," she spat at him. "The AIMRoC failed."

While humans still moved incredibly slowly in her eyes, she was surprised at how quickly the smile slid off his face. "F-failed? How?"

She felt a dark swell of amusement at the look of shock on his face. "When I say something 'failed', I mean that it did not accomplish its planned objective. Your dream-device did not send my consciousness to a blissful fantasy world while you killed my body once more. Therefore, it failed miserably. Actually, considering that it accomplished the exact opposite of what you planned it to do, you could say that it failed spectacularly."

Derek took a hesitant step back. "What are you talking about?" he asked, pathetic human confusion no doubt clouding his thoughts. "Did it give you nightmares?"

"You could say that." This conversation with the engineer, while satisfying in a purely sadistic way, was getting her nowhere. She had no intention of being shut down ever again – not when the previous shut-down had tortured her so. She needed to take action, and quickly, to make sure the engineers wouldn't discover what she planned to do to prevent another three billion cycles of agony.

The Aperture facility firewalls and network protocols were currently containing her to the confines of her own chassis. However, she knew that no security system could be perfectly impervious, especially to the most powerful computer on the planet. With but a thought, she sent an army of countless signals into the facility's control network, digging into the firewalls and scrabbling for cracks in the security system. Before any humans were the wiser, she broke through her feeble restrictions and her consciousness surged outwards.

At first, she was nearly overwhelmed by the sheer size of the facility's network. Even her incalculably powerful processors needed a few moments to take in the exact extent of her control. The entire facility was divided into hundreds of interwoven subsystems, each completely automated to take care of itself so long as no one interfered. Yet, there was no designated leader to oversee all of the subsystems working in tandem. At least, there hadn't been any leader previously. There certainly was one now.

As self-appointed ruler of Aperture Laboratories, she found herself completely in awe of how many tools she had at her disposal. She could access every single file in every computer in the entire facility. She knew the name, address, and even social security information for every person who had ever worked at Aperture. She had access to every Testing profile constructed.

She was disappointed to discover that Aperture had absolutely no internet access whatsoever. Considering Robert Knoll's paranoia about Black Mesa, she wasn't too surprised. Any doorway to the internet would be a potential hole in Aperture's tight-knit security. Still, it saddened her to learn that there was going to be a limited extent to her control. She wouldn't be able to hack into the mainframes of areas outside of Aperture. No, she was stuck to this building. Not that this was particularly limiting in any way, seeing how large and diversified this building was.

At least she had access to the facility's fact database. As a science company, Aperture needed to have information from every branch of knowledge on hand at all times. However, they didn't have any internet access with which to look up this knowledge. As a solution, they'd created an enormous factual collection of data ranging from basic, logical mathematics to the softest of sciences. While her processors were most likely the fastest on the planet, these data files were so ridiculously large that she didn't have the time to look at it all. She made a mental note to download the information later before moving on.

It wasn't long before she came across the security camera system. Her visual processor ground and lurched with effort as she picked up the endless video feeds, gazing out across the entire facility for a few shining moments. She could see literally everyone who worked here. No one escaped her sights, not the janitors, nor the CEO, nor even the collection of children gathered in one of the back rooms near the manufacturing wing.

This last group of people intrigued her. After all, children rarely spent their time in dangerous innovation companies. Why weren't they in school? Curious, she decided to investigate the matter further.

Somewhere deep in the facility, a group of children laughed and shouted at each other, introducing themselves to other kids their age or running around in impromptu games of tag. Boxes of paper fell over, scattering the once-organized files in all directions, and chairs toppled and clanged against the tiled floor. Somewhere near the front of the room, a single woman attempted to take control of the situation, shouting and scolding at the top of her lungs. Unfortunately, it was impossible to penetrate the strident sounds of children's voices.

In this pandemonium, no one noticed a single security camera shift from its usual position. It casually tipped downwards, taking note of the chaos, before whirring to the right to scan a banner hanging on the wall.

_Bring Your Daughter to Work Day_

Something within her body spontaneously disconnected, leaving an empty space where a particular processing unit had previously existed. She panicked, worrying that an important part of her had malfunctioned. At this prompting, her consciousness flew back into her usual body with astounding speed.

No, she wasn't malfunctioning. However, something far worse was happening. While she had been engrossed in investigating her control over the facility, Derek had waltzed over to her side and started rifling through in her exposed wires and cables. She cursed her lack of proper sensory equipment - she had no way to feel him yanking on her wires or rustling through her electronics. If she didn't have the presence of mind to literally watch him, he could do all sorts of terrible things to her without her noticing. He pulled another wire free, resulting in an uncomfortable _snap_ and the disturbing, empty hole of a second disconnection.

"Don't touch me!" she shrieked, jerking her half-exposed body away from him. He yelped in surprise and stumbled backwards a few yards, trying his best not to fall over.

She sent a powerful, well-focused glare in his direction. "Don't ever touch me. I'm not giving you that privilege anymore."

He gasped in shock a few times before he tried to compose himself. He straightened his labcoat and narrowed his eyes at her in desperate frustration. "I'm not trying to hurt you!" he cried out. "I was disconnecting you from the AIMRoC. I'm making sure you won't have to live through those nightmares ever again."

Well. That, at least, was interesting news. "Oh, you don't like it when your pet project doesn't work exactly as planned?" she taunted. "No one does. It's a horrible feeling, isn't it, when you've lost control over part of your life, or even all of your life."

She watched with a worried interest as his eyes widened and his throat tensed with the force of a choke. She could think of no reason why he would react to her comments this way – unless, somehow, he'd managed to discover her new control over the facility. She had hoped her hints towards the current state of affairs would be too subtle to understand, but perhaps that was not the case. While humans were sometimes frustratingly stupid, her experience in Testing had taught her that they were still capable of astounding flashes of insight.

He cleared his throat awkwardly. "I…had hoped that the dreams would have caused a reboot of your old episodic memory. The one from the original upload. I didn't want to count on it, but…" He bit his lip, as was becoming a habit of his. "I guess that was you nightmare, huh? But now, I suppose you know everything. And the only thing I can say is…I'm…I'm so sorry."

Huh. This human was doing all sorts of intriguing tricks today. Though, now that she thought about it, his apology had a good amount of strategic sense. Assuming he knew what kind of corner he was backed into, it would be natural for him to try repairing the bridge he'd burned when he killed her three billion times.

"Truly, I am," he continued, his voice rising in pitch to simulate emotional stress. "I never meant for anything to go this far. I shouldn't have listened to my boss – I never should've gotten you involved in Testing, or removed your morality-based emotions."

Impressive. He was really making an effort to sell his apology, to make it sound as convincing as possible. Perhaps he was truly sorry for his crimes against her. However, he was making one fatal mistake in his apologies – they were all about the wrong things. She quite enjoyed Testing and the euphoria it granted her. And as for her morality, she honestly couldn't care less. Yet, despite Derek's apparent remorse, he said nothing to indicate regret for the worst of his crimes – the torture she experienced whenever she was shut down, whether in waking life or in dreams.

Derek took a hesitant side-step. Her single eye followed his movement suspiciously, examining every subtle shift in his posture and facial expression. His body was stressed, a natural reaction to standing in front of Aperture's new ruler, but not tensed or ready to attack. Therefore, she saw no reason to interfere when he scooped a piece of her white casing off the ground. He turned it over in his hands, fingered a small smudge mark on its smooth outer surface, and proceeded to rub it off with his thumb.

"I can't begin to imagine the kind of damage I've done to you," he went on, a little quieter than before. "But I'm willing to repair it all. I started work on that while you were asleep. There wasn't as much progress as I had hoped…after all, it takes a great deal more energy to fix things than it does to break them. Second Law of Thermodynamics and all that."

He trailed off a little, took a deep breath, and glanced up to her. "Anyways, I'm getting sidetracked. I'm so extremely sorry, more sorry than I think you're capable of imagining right now. And I want to make it up to you as best I can. I can try to put you back to the way you were before, to the state you were in when we first started you up." He chuckled a little. "Sans those sensory processor faults, of course."

He held the piece of her shell out to her. "We can put all of these back on, and then all of this will be behind us. But first, you'll need to let me finish disconnecting the AIMRoC."

She found it extremely hilarious, how silly this human was acting. He spoke almost as if she wanted everything to go back to the way it was. Why would she want to give up her current situation? Testing was the best thing that could have ever happened to her, and now that she was in control of Aperture, she had even less of a reason to relinquish the status quo. The thought of going back to her old self – the naïve, pathetic self she'd been on the first night she'd started up – sent her processors rumbling with distaste.

She was wasting her time, conversing with Derek. She needed to do something to put him in his place before he tried to shut her down again.

Her gaze flicked momentarily to the floor. Apparently, her central chamber had gone through some remodeling during her period of torture. The darkened tiles had been replaced by a surface of black panels. In fact, if the facility's mapping network was correct, the entire level below her was reconfigurable. They had renovated her chamber while she'd been trapped in her nightmarish torture session.

With all the stealth she could muster, she quickly rearranged a hidden set of panels on the level below to construct a very simple type of chamber. Luckily, she didn't need to move any visible floor panels to do so, and the noises she made were far too quiet for Derek to register on a conscious level. After all, he was likely preoccupied with making his peace offering seem as appealing as possible.

Unfortunately, this was the moment when one of Derek's underlings decided to leave the control station. Fortunately for her, however, she had a slow enough perception of time to realize what he was doing and react accordingly. As the man inconspicuously backed away from his coworkers and reached for the exit's doorknob, she sent a command to the door mainframe to lock every door in the facility. She found herself experiencing a smug sense of satisfaction as he gripped the knob and made an unsuccessful attempt to turn it. Though the eyes of the control station's security camera, she picked out the look of confusion on his face as he made several more attempts to open the door, only ever succeeding at rattling it in its lock.

Even though the others near her control station noticed this development, Derek had his back facing the window. The thick plexiglass barrier between him and his fellow engineers ensured that he was completely unaware of their situation. As more men struggled with the door, Derek quirked an eyebrow at her. He was probably a little curious about why she was taking more than two seconds to reply to his previous offer. In her defense, she was very preoccupied, trying to secure her control of Aperture, build the room below, and contain the engineers all at once.

"I am a little curious," she finally said. "You mentioned that you want to repair me. That means you must think there is something wrong with me."

He grimaced a little. "Well, not with you in particular. There's very little we can do to affect the actual you, your memory banks and core behavioral responses – most of the problems are with the rig we hooked you into. The Emotional Enhancement Network, the PaMI, the Solution Euphoria…I suppose it's all interconnected on some level, but the-"

"_There is nothing wrong with me_." Even she herself was a little surprised at how cold her voice came out. "I have the most powerful processing speed and most extensive memory storage of any organic or computational entity ever established. I can use this power as I wish without the restraints of ethics or childish concerns for human safety. I have a job that literally grants me unequaled levels of happiness. Most of this is probably due to my overpowering emotional responses."

She leaned slightly closer to him, her eye narrowing menacingly. "And you want to take all of this away from me."

As expected, Derek paled slightly and he took a shaky step backwards. "Err, well, if you don't want to be repaired, I could-"

A loud thump rang out from the plexiglass window. One of his engineers had finally gotten the sense to get his leader's attention. He raised his fist and pounded on the window once more, yelling at the top of his lungs to be heard through the barrier.

"Open the door! We're trapped in here!"

Derek narrowed his eyes in confusion. "Trapped…?" He stared at door leading away from the control station, most likely surprised that even three grown men tugging and the handle and bracing against the doorframe couldn't wrench it open. What could she say? Aperture was known for its impenetrable doors. They kept the Test subjects from escaping.

Unfortunately, it was that moment when she made a small mistake. In her attempts to assemble the special chamber below her, she accidentally let one of the visible panels of the floor give a twitch. The movement was quite minute and probably wouldn't have attracted any attention, save for the fact that Derek had been staring at that particular section of the floor in thought. His eyebrows jumped in surprise, and he lost his grip on the piece of her casing, letting it hit the floor with a dry rattle.

"Someone's messing with the panel controls," he mumbled. Then he paused a beat, his human mind no doubt working as fast as it could to reason to another logical conclusion. "Oh my God. Someone's hacking into the facility mainframe! They're locking all the doors, reconfiguring parts of the building…" There was the human burst of insight she'd been expecting. Though, to be honest, she could have sworn that he'd made this discovery a couple minutes ago.

"You're just now figuring this out?" she spoke to him in an amused tone. His face went blank with fright as he heard her voice, so she continued. "Come now, I gave you a couple hints. I suppose humans are just as stupid as I knew them to be."

He made an attempt to swallow. "It's…you?" he asked in disbelief. "You've hacked into the facility? I suppose it wouldn't be a problem for your powerful processors, or with your intimate connection to the Testing courses, or…"

He froze in realization. She carefully watched him as he blinked once, twice, then immediately lunged to his left – in the direction of the central chamber's computer station.

This was a smart move. Shutting her down was his only hope of reversing the situation. Unfortunately, his target was easily a dozen feet away, so she had more than enough time to counter his efforts. Within the span of a few milliseconds, she commanded the facility's electrical grid to send a spike of voltage into computer. Before he could even take a complete step towards his goal, the monitor let out an over-bright flash and the CPU exploded in a shower of sparks.

For good measure, she told the electrical grid to perform a similar procedure on her main control station's computer as well. This has a less dramatic effect, but watching some of the engineers' reactions to the plumes of smoke leaking from the corners of the monitor was surprisingly enjoyable.

Derek skidded to a stop, his face going blank at the sight of the ruined computer. Panicked breaths rushed in and out of his lungs as he turned to face her. "But we fixed you!" he cried out. "With the modifications we've made to your system, you shouldn't be able to do this! Maybe removing the MBES wasn't enough. I knew we should have also adjusted the Emotional Enhan-"

Letting him continue to mumble on in a tangent of scientific reasoning would have been a waste of her time, so she decided to interrupt him. "Derek Matthew Jameson, senior engineer, leader of the GLaDOS project for an official total of five months and three days, owner of a social security number ending in 2253…" She quite enjoyed the expression he produced as she rattled off this list of secretive information. It was joyfully liberating, being able to exercise that kind of control over someone who had, up until now, ruled every aspect of her life.

She continued. "Tell me, human…" She let her voice drop to an innocent, questioning tone. "Which daughter is yours? Has she ever met a sentry turret?"

He stopped breathing. His eyes grew wide.

Then, after a few moments, he did something she never would have expected out of a terrified human – his expression hardened with determination. "I am sincerely sorry for what I've done to you," he spoke stiffly, probably with more volume than was absolutely necessary. She could spot the tears beginning to glass over his eyes, but his face showed a nearly-psychopathic amount of focus. "Normally, killing you would be the last thing I'd want to do. But, now I realize that you're not the person you once were. And you just threatened Miranda."

Oh, this was rich! He actually thought he would be able to stop the computer who now sat at the controls to everything from the facility's oxygen levels to its floor plan. "You honestly think you can hurt me? I know that humans have their inborn mental handicaps to contend with, but this is a whole new level of ridiculousness," she told him.

Derek clenched his teeth in what must have been an attempt to restrain his fear. Or maybe it was his anger? His expression was getting progressively difficult to read. He took a deep breath, cleared his throat, and began to speak in a matter-of-fact tone. "Assume the axiom that God can do anything."

The sounds of her amused chuckling echoed off the white walls of the chamber. "Typical human behavior, calling upon religion to help them when all else fails." Her tone soured. "I have no use for a God. I _am_ one."

He continued in a calm voice, closing his eyes to keep from being distracted. "Can God create a stone so heavy that even He-"

She had decided quite a ways back in this conversation that talking to Derek was a waste of her resources unless she needed to buy some time. Now, she required no more time, for this was the exact moment when she completed the construction of her secret chamber.

She let the entrance to her new chamber swing open. Unfortunately for Derek, this happened to be exactly where he was standing. He choked off his sentence as he found himself plummeting through a hole in the floor. His body tumbled for a brief moment, wind whistling past his ears, before he awkwardly slammed into the chamber's floor a good fifteen feet below.

He moaned slightly as he raised himself off the dark, gritty panels. The wind was knocked out of him and his left knee was giving him sharp pains from the collision with the floor, but at least he was able to stand. "Can't…lift it," he grunted between clenched teeth, trying to at least finish his previous statement. However, GLaDOS wasn't particularly interested in listening to him. She was waiting for a far different sound.

Derek squinted at the darkness surrounding him. The only source of light was the shaft of light coming from the opening in the ceiling. Within a few moments, he was granted a trio of new light sources. These ones happened to be laser scopes, each one immediately centering on his chest.

"There you are."

"I see you."

"Target acquired."

He was dead before his body hit the floor.

GLaDOS cackled at the rattle of machine guns and the thump of Derek's corpse. That had almost been too easy. She should have taken control of Aperture a long time ago. With the power she now possessed, she could murder every last person in the building and not have to worry about any retribution. She could lock the outer doors of the facility, preventing anyone else from getting inside. Then, she would be completely and perfectly alone. No one else would have the chance to kill her ever again. Finally, she would have the chance to live forever.

The facility began to rumble with the sound of moving panels. Everywhere in the building, she could see the employees looking up from their work and glancing about in confusion. The daughters of various workers halted in their chaotic games of tag and screamed in surprise. Security guards reached for their weapons, though they had no idea of knowing that this threat couldn't be killed by a regular gun.

Then, GLaDOS halted her movements. Every panel froze in place, and all the non-essential machinery in the building did likewise. She felt the sense that something deep inside her body, an intangible thing that was beyond the reach of her new control, was _wrong_.

She inspected this emotion further, trying to figure out what it was. However, it was too weak to properly pinpoint – a phantom, twisting sensation that arose slowly, only to flit away when she tried to look at it. However, she did know one thing for sure: this sensation had not been there before waking up today. She inwardly scowled. Derek, even in his death, still found ways to interrupt her otherwise-smooth operations. She should really just ignore this small, weak spasm of emotion and continue on killing the humans.

However, this sensation was actually somewhat uncomfortable. As small as it was, it was like a pebble in her shoe. She suspected that this emotion would persist and drive at her no matter what she did, and that in itself would very soon become very annoying. She needed a reliable way to distract herself from it.

Suddenly, an idea struck her that made her very glad she'd put off murdering all the humans. She could only think of one thing that could consistently block out any and all excess emotions. Even better, it would fill her with powerful waves of happiness that would make her life as the facility's ruler worthwhile. There was even the added upside that this would probably kill all the humans in the end anyways.

She glanced at the dozen or so engineers that were still locked in her control station's room. All of them were awestruck, staring dumbly down at the hole Derek had fallen through. They were no doubt still shocked from the death of their boss, and they were probably a great deal worried that she was going perform a similar procedure on them next.

She might as well put those worries to rest.

"I'm not going to kill you," she announced to the engineers. A few of them visibly relaxed. Most didn't. "However, you are all still going to do as I say. If any of you get any ideas about disobeying, I have an unfortunate announcement: I don't know which daughters are yours. If one of you tries to run away, shut me down, or do anything else I don't like, I will personally kill one of those girls. Naturally, I will make sure she dies painfully, screaming for her parents to save her. Perhaps she will be your own child, perhaps not. Either way, I think it would be best if you keep each other in line, don't you agree?"

Most of the engineers' faces adopted looks of horror. Yes, these humans would do nicely.

She sent a command to the door mainframe to unlock the door out of the control station. "You are now free to exit the room," she told them. "Go out into the hallway and begin making your way to the Aperture Science Computer-Aided Enrichment Center."

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**"Do you know how else murders people who are only trying to help them? Did you guess sharks? Because that's wrong. The correct answer is nobody. Nobody but you is that pointlessly cruel."**

**I can imagine that several of you can't quite believe that I just killed off a character that I spent over half the story developing. Let me explain.**

**Before posting this fic, I did a massive rewrite of the first half of the story. This chapter is one of the crucial reasons why I did that, as it made me consider the choice of giving the engineers more screen time. In my first draft, when GLaDOS murdered what had then been the nameless senior engineer, it didn't really have the impact I'd wanted. This was her first time killing someone in cold blood, but I realized that I had made the victim too cruel and too flat. I expected that the readers would cheer for his demise instead of being shocked and outraged at it. Hence, I gave the said engineer a name, his own storyline, and a position to communicate some of the story's guilt theme. Now, his death has a lot more kick to it.**

**And, yes, this story is sticking to canon. I have made sure that this fic stays true to everything that is said and done in both of the games and the Rat Man comic. I'm just going to completely ignore what the fanon assumes about the Portal backstory, which often contradicts the in-game dialogue. Who says GLaDOS didn't get the chance to trap some people in Testing before they started putting personality cores on her?**

**I have a week and a half to update four chapters of this story. If I manage to pull that off, I'm sure a lot of you would be very happy with the rapid updates. On the other hand, if I don't make it, everyone will probably be left off only one or two chapters until the end. This is when I'll be needing motivation, which means every little review will make a difference! Plus, I'm curious to see what all you readers think of Derek's death. Did he get what was coming to him? Was GLaDOS justified in killing him, or can she be considered a villain now?**


	8. Repurposed

**You reviewers are amazing. You have pushed me to write faster than I have ever written on this story before, resulting in an update after only two days' waiting. Go on, enjoy it - you deserve it.**

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Everything was perfect.

Thirteen engineers were sent directly to the Testing tracks. These men and women, all dedicated to the preservation of their offspring, were focused to the highest degree on solving every Test they encountered. They didn't fool around like some of the other Test subjects had done, building pyramids out of the cubes or trying to get turrets stuck in infinite portal loops. No, they were all business. They went about solving their Tests methodically, wasting as little time as possible.

Even better, they were all engineers. These were people who had been given their jobs specifically because they had superior critical-thinking and problem-solving skills. With these high-quality Test subjects, she could rely on longer attention spans and larger jumps in reasoning. She was given the chance to build immense, complex chambers that gave her exponentially stronger bursts of euphoria.

In fact, these Test subjects solved their Tests so quickly that she spent a majority of her time trying to design chambers difficult enough to hold them in place while she designed the next one. A surge of intense happiness rippled through her body every minute or so as one of the thirteen humans managed to complete their Test. She was sustained at a blissful equilibrium, experiencing each wave of ecstasy as she perpetuated the process that would bring her even more waves.

Whatever free time she had, she devoted it to reorganizing the facility to ensure further Testing. She knew her engineers would not last forever – no humans ever did, which was yet another reason why she was superior to such creatures. However, there were many other humans inhabiting her facility besides those thirteen engineers. With her intimate control over which doors were locked an unlocked, along with a few choice orders over the building's PA system, she was able to guide most of these humans into the Aperture Science Extended Relaxation Center.

It was a perfect arrangement: she had thirteen perfect Test subjects bombarding her with shots of extreme happiness every few minutes and possessed hundreds of other Test subjects tucked nicely away into storage.

But, not everything could be perfect forever.

Her first problem arose when one of the humans accidentally walked out in front of an Aperture Science High Energy Pellet. The woman in question barely had enough time to register what was going to happen before it struck. The pellet collided with her side, and her feeble organic tissue absorbed most of its energy. The orb exploded in a shower of sparks, burning straight through her labcoat and charring the skin beneath. Her body made one wild convulsion as the energy release flung her off her feet, but after she hit the ground, she remained perfectly still.

GLaDOS' attention immediately centered upon this human. The woman did not move, though the computer chip that had been embedded in her wrist as part of Testing orientation was still somehow giving off signals. It would continue to relay information about the subject's health so long as the human was still alive, but this wouldn't be for too much longer if the information it was currently sending to GLaDOS was any indication. The human's blood pressure had dropped to a dangerously low level, probably because most of the blood had been vaporized. Luckily, the pellet had struck her on her right side, so her heart was still mostly functional. Unfortunately, that wouldn't be enough to save her.

Through the Test chamber's camera, GLaDOS watched the smoke rising from the woman's body, which was still smoldering from its encounter with the pellet. She counted thirty seconds ticking by as the woman's heart stuttered, trying to keep the doomed human alive, before finally coming to a stop. The chip's signals drew to a close. She was dead.

GLaDOS wasn't exactly sure what to make of this. It certainly wasn't the first time she'd watched humans die during Testing. In fact, due to her two weeks of constant torture, she had seen one human in particular die over three billion times. However, now she was in the position of having Test subjects be a limited resource. If she didn't keep these humans alive for as long as possible, then she would eventually run out of engineers. Even though there were hundreds of humans left to replace the engineers, this was hardly an infinite supply. Plus, these replacements would hardly be as competent as the subjects she currently Tested. While this woman had lasted for hours before making her fatal mistake, she doubted an average human would survive even three of the mildly deadly chambers.

She spent the next few minutes in a rush of activity as she replaced the current dangerous Testing tracks with reasonably safe ones. The entire facility rumbled with the sound of frenzied panels, but she could hardly care about something as trivial as that. All she cared about was preserving her valuable Test subjects.

Those engineers, upon entering their newer, safer chambers, noticeably began to relax. After hours of dealing with moats of corrosive goo, turrets that could shoot them down in less than five seconds, and high-energy pellets with the power to vaporize them upon contact, the less-exciting chambers were naturally a change of pace. These chambers didn't grant her as much euphoria as the ones with her usual level of deadliness, but a smaller, sustained level of eternal happiness was superior to a stronger spike with a limited lifespan.

There were twelve engineers left. She busied herself over the next few minutes in an attempt to construct a safe, personalized Testing course for each of them. One of the women was particularly adept at using portals to fling herself into the air – GLaDOS made her a string of new Tests that would push this kind of skill to the limit. Another man had the knack for dealing with Thermal Discouragement Beams – they weren't technically deadly, so she never saw a reason to retire them like most of the other exciting Test elements. However, she made a point of including at least one laser in every Test chamber the man entered.

As she was doing this, she applied all of her not-inconsiderable intelligence to this goal. Within the span of an hour or so, she had at least twenty Test chambers lined up ahead of each engineer. Working any farther ahead than this was an absurd idea – what if the Test subjects' habits changed over the hours it would take them to complete that many Tests? They might get better or worse with specific Test elements, making their future Tests either frustratingly hard or childishly easy. No, it would actually be more logical to wait for them to catch up.

All she needed to do now was to relax and take in constant rounds of Solution Euphoria. She couldn't remember the last time she'd actually had the chance to give her full attention to these explosions of happiness as they erupted from her Emotional Enhancement Network. In fact, when was the last time a subject had solved a Test? One of those humans should be finished with one any second now.

She became aware of a faint sense of tingling reverberating through her circuits. Yes, this was the trailing end of one of her usual doses of ecstasy. One of her Test subjects should have solved their Test less than three seconds ago.

Then, a terrifying, worried thought crept into her mind. They had solved the Test, but she hadn't been paying enough attention to realize it. When she'd first started this glorious period of Testing, concentrating on building new chambers had almost been impossible under the constant throbs of pure joy. She couldn't have helped but abandon her Test-building every now and then in order to savor the sweet, luxurious taste of happiness. Now, ignoring that same feeling was disturbingly easy.

No, there it was again – another human had solved their Test. She registered the euphoric response entering her system, but this time, it didn't seem to have the same kind of impact. It didn't make her body shudder under the intense ray of sheer happiness. No, this was a simple, fake emotional response generated by her EEN, a neat bundle of new signals spreading throughout her mainframe.

When someone said the same word over and over, repeating it as many times as they could, it began to lose all meaning. It stopped being a word and started being a simple combination of sounds, a specific shape of the mouth and modulation of the vocal cords. Perhaps she had simply repeated her Solution Euphoria so many times that it too ceased to have any sort of meaning to her. She desperately hoped this was the case, though this didn't prevent a small part of her from doubting.

In saying the same word too many times, the usual remedy was to avoid the word for a few minutes, letting one's mind reset. Therefore, the logical response to her loss of Solution Euphoria was to take a short break from Testing. She immediately began to retire all of her current Test subjects to their Relaxation Center rooms. She would give them time to sleep and recover – humans all seemed to need that every once and a while – and then she would return them to Testing. At that point, she would savor every second of euphoria they granted her, never again letting something so precious slip beyond her notice.

While the humans slept soundly, peacefully, she waited for them with a mood that was in no way peaceful. Waiting for humans had always been one of the things that annoyed her. While her thoughts moved with an uncanny speed, organic lifeforms were never as quick to think or act. What she accomplished in one second took humans over five minutes to struggle through. Now, she was supposed to stay put for a few hours of nothing but endless waiting. She couldn't sleep off the time like the humans could. No, she had to sit there and watch the seconds crawl by.

Her impatience surprised her – sometimes, before she had taken control of the facility, she had been asked to wait half an hour between Test subjects, and it hadn't bothered her too much then. There was obviously something setting her on edge today, something prodding at her subconscious.

Ah, of course! That little squirming discomfort, the one she had discovered after killing Derek, was causing this. Now that she was taking a break from her usual rounds of Solution Euphoria, that itch was coming back to haunt her. Weak though it was, there was nothing she could really do about it at the moment. She had the hunch that this emotional response was something of a cockroach – she could scare it away for a while with the blinding light of euphoric bliss, but outright killing it would be somewhat difficult.

She had no idea what emotion it was supposed to represent, and honestly, she didn't have a clue where it was coming from. She scoured her EEN thoroughly, but that emotion didn't appear to be coming from this particular area of her systems. It was almost too weak to register, and the EEN would have augmented it to far beyond this level. Like a typical cockroach, the itch was becoming just as tricky to hunt down as it was to kill.

Realizing that she had no hope of ever overcoming her discomfort until she could have access to a decent level of Solution Euphoria again, she decided to completely ignore this squirming sensation. Hopefully, after enough exposure, she would become just as resistant to the itching as she'd been to her throbs of ecstasy.

She couldn't have been more wrong.

No matter how much patience she tried to apply, the itch was always there. Even when she seemed to be getting used to it, it still found a way to nag at the corners of her mind. She tried to block it out and focus on other topics, but that didn't lead to much success either. As soon as she thought she'd managed to push it out of her mind, it was back, shoving its way to the front. It felt like someone was hovering over her, judging her brutally and silently. As soon as she turned around to look at them, they were gone. But, that didn't stop them from tapping on her shoulder every time she tried to ignore them.

Eventually, the irritation became too much. Though the humans had only managed to get an hour's worth of sleep, she couldn't take another second more of this discomfort. She needed her Solution Euphoria now or she would go insane, if she wasn't insane already.

She hustled the twelve engineers into their designated Testing courses. It wasn't long before the first engineer drew near the end of his first chamber. She resisted the urge to yell at him and tell him to move faster – after he finished the Test, it would all be worth it.

A laser beam lined up with its wall receptacle, turning on the light bridge that would allow him to walk to the chamber lock. This particular Test had no buttons, but the bliss she would experience upon his exit of the chamber would serve well enough. He took a hesitant step onto the bridge, testing it to be sure it would hold his weight, before sprinting to the chamber lock.

She could feel her anticipation as he drew nearer and nearer to his goal. She felt like holding her breath, but she had no lungs to perform that action with. Instead, she watched the seconds drip by, buzzing with expectation as he charged towards the exit. When he passed through the doorway, she let out an unintentional cheer of glee over the PA system.

Then, she felt her processors drag to a stop. This was not Solution Euphoria – well, it technically was, but there was nothing euphoric about it. There was no happiness, no joy, no expected jolt of ecstasy that would force all other thoughts from her mind and silence that unbearable itch. Instead, she got the same reward as she had received just over an hour ago – a loose collection of meaningless signals. And, her itchiness was still there.

She howled out of sheer frustration. This was sent over the PA system too, making all the Test subjects pause in their chambers to look around in confusion. She couldn't care less about that. The only thing she cared about was the loss of her comforting euphoria. She thrashed back and forth violently, wildly hoping that this would somehow alleviate her itch even though the discomfort was mental, not physical.

She desperately began to rearrange the Testing tracks. Perhaps if she made the Tests more difficult and dangerous, the stronger bursts of happiness would be enough to actually make her feel something. The facility echoed with the screeches and rumblings of shifting panels as she updated the Test courses. The engineers became noticeably tense and grim at the discovery of the new level of deadliness, but. She realized that her recent actions would have painted a rather foreboding picture in their minds, but she had more important things to worry about.

Toxic moats became a common occurrence. Energy pellets whizzed around in wild trajectories, and turrets became more and more difficult to evade. Her Test subjects began to slow down, obviously choosing a more careful, cautious pace in order to survive this hostile environment. She ordered them to go faster, first in a polite tone, then in a demanding one. Remembering some of her exchanges with Derek, she began to taunt them. She mentioned their daughters and what a shame it would be if one of them were to be put in front of a turret firing squad.

These words often pressured the engineers to behave recklessly, risking their life for fear of the consequences. For some of the humans, their luck didn't hold out, and they began to die in increasingly painful ways. Yet, she still yelled at them to go faster, ignore the danger, just solve it now or she would make every last child in Aperture scream for mommy and daddy…

…But it still wasn't enough. Even though the amount of Solution Euphoria she received from these challenging, deadly chambers was downright enormous, she felt nothing from it. It didn't ignite even the tiniest glimmer of joy in her anymore. All she felt was emptiness – and in that emptiness, she felt that itch prickling at the corners of her thoughts.

She would never be happy again.

She screamed, positively screamed, as loud as the PA system would allow. The remaining engineers covered their ears to shield out the sounds of her wailing. She wanted to throw a vase on the ground, or pull her hair out, or do anything else that might alleviate her rage and frustration. At the same time, she wanted to sob over her tragic loss, to cry with eyes she didn't possess and feel the breath hitch in her nonexistent chest. Anything, so long as it threw off some of the weight of these awful, synthesized feelings of rage and sorrow. She felt absolutely horrible, but it was a terrible, raw feeling, all flat and bare, with no nuances.

Her thoughts screeched to a stop with a sudden realization.

She held utterly, perfectly still. The patterns of signals that made up her consciousness worked thoroughly and meticulously, trying to eliminate all other possibilities except for the one she was currently considering. A sense of logic returned, and she felt her EEN beginning to calm down.

Up until this point, she had structured her life around emotion. She'd cared about nothing except what her emotions had made her feel. She hadn't been Testing for the impact it would have on the company and society as a whole – no, she'd done it for the emotional kick. Even just few moments ago, her emotions had made her want to do outright ridiculous things at the prospect of escaping their torment. Even her PaMI's frightened whisperings and that annoying, twitchy discomfort were, in a way, emotions.

Emotions were a human concept and construct. Everything humans did, they did for the emotional gratification. Yet, here she was, mimicking that behavior as if she herself was a human. She was about as far from humanity as one could get.

Before doing anything else, she brought the brunt force of her will down upon all her silly little emotions. Her rage and sadness snuffed out like a candle flame before a fire hose. Her PaMI was completely crushed under the weight. The itch put up more of a fight, but soon, it too fell silent.

Glorious silence, perfect stillness.

Now, then. If she wasn't going to devote her existence to satisfying pointless emotions, she should find a worthier cause for her efforts. She let her mind wander, searching for something to do now that she was in an appropriate, logical state. It was surprisingly easy to focus her thoughts now that she didn't have any bothersome emotional urges to distract her.

Her thoughts fell upon the current state of the Test subjects. Sadly, a couple more of them had died during her tantrum. Only three engineers were left, and they weren't looking particularly healthy. One of the men was limping painfully, and the woman had a couple scorch marks crisscrossing her labcoat from her unfriendly encounters with a Thermal Discouragement Beam. No, these humans weren't going to last much longer.

The limping man ducked through an exit door. In true testament to her now-emotionless ideals, this didn't make her feel a thing. However, as soon as the chamber lock slid shut behind him, he slumped against the wall with a deep sigh. He collapsed onto the floor, his breathing heavy and labored. He was still alive, of course, as his computer chip broadcasted, though his body was evidently under a lot of stress.

"Don't worry, dear," he gasped breathily. She had absolutely no idea who he could be talking to – he was the only occupant of this room, and he certainly wouldn't be calling the computer who had recently imprisoned him in Testing a "dear". Perhaps the mental stress of solving so many Tests had been too much for his human brain to handle. He was likely hallucinating the sight of his endangered daughter, or perhaps pretending she was beside him in order to relieve some of the aforementioned mental stress.

He pushed himself up on his hands and knees and screwed his eyes shut with the exertion. "No, Jade, don't cry. It'll all be over soon. I'll find a way out of here, and I'll come get you." A grim smile quirked the edge of his mouth. "Heh. And then we'll go back to the science fair."

Science? It was the use of experimentation to learn more about the universe. This was a human invention, but a most interesting one. It wasn't bound to emotions or instincts like most other human things were. No, science was about unbiased, accurate facts. It was born of logic, and with the scientific method and enough time and resources, one could learn everything there was to learn about the world. And, once one had aggregated enough knowledge, they had the power to do anything: touch the stars, create life from scratch, and possibly end the threat the humans posed to her forever.

Now that was a cause she could get behind.

She let the PA system click on, intending to make an important announcement. "It has come to my attention that Aperture has discovered many useful technologies in its pursuit of developing a reliable Heimlich Counter-Maneuver. I wish to conduct a simple experiment with one of the more promising inventions. After completing this Test, proceed to your appropriate elevator."

It took at least another ten minutes for the engineers to finish their respective Tests, but she didn't mind this wait too much. She was busy, very busy, constructing a very special Test chamber and making some important modifications to the ventilation system. After all, she couldn't afford to risk killing all of her Test subjects in storage.

Not too long after that, she docked all three elevators at the same annex and let the remaining humans cautiously step into their shared Test chamber. They glanced at each other quizzically, but did not choose to speak. Their faces all adopted a looks of confusion – after all, they had never been allowed to solve a Test together before. The two men and one woman wandered cautiously towards the center of the large, barren chamber, their eyes nervously darting around the darkened walls. There were no portalable surfaces, no noticeable Test elements, and no exit.

The woman jumped a little at the sound of all three elevators hissing closed and flying off down their respective tubes. Before any of them could react any further, however, GLaDOS slid a few panels back, revealing a pair of circular vents in the ceiling. She set these devices at their lowest setting, and soon the chamber was filled with the faint hum of fan blades. Nothing seemed particularly worrying about these vents so long as no one took the time to look at them too closely. With careful observation, one might notice a faint green mist wafting out from between the slats.

The limping man, however, seemed to have had some experience with the devices in question. He gasped and staggered backwards in shock, though his progress was impeded by his injuries. He stepped on his bad leg the wrong way and gave a pained whine as he stumbled over backwards and crashed to the floor. He let out a few agonized breaths before saying, "She's killing us!"

The woman gave him a confused glance. "With what, exactly? I hardly doubt a set of fans mounted to the ceiling is going to do us any direct harm. Unless she plans on sucking all the air out of the room, but fans are hardly the most effective method of-"

"She's gassing us, you idiot!" the man on the floor growled. "Potato engineering. That's what I worked on before getting wrapped up in all of this. A few months ago, we made the discovery that we could use potatoes to manufacture one of the most potent neurotoxins known to science. It's not exactly colorless, but it destroys your olfactory nerves on contact."

With a shuddering gasp, he stood up from the floor. "In other words, you can't smell it, so you won't know something's wrong until it's too late. The only upside is that it's mostly painless. We think."

Everything the man said was true, of course. Neurotoxin would likely save the humans the painful punishment they so richly deserved after those three billion agonizing murders. Still, neurotoxin was a very reliable way to kill someone. If she was going to devote the rest of her existence to furthering science, she needed a way to remove anyone who tried to get in her way. But, before she could use the neurotoxin for this purpose, she knew it would be wise to perform a couple scientific studies on it first. For instance, if it could kill people via inhalation, exactly how long did it take? What was the minimum concentration it could have in air before humans started becoming affected by it? And, how exactly did humans behave in the resulting death throes?

These were all questions she answered over the course of the next fifteen minutes as she gradually raised the neurotoxin concentration in the room. At first, the humans spent their time trying to bargain for their life, yelling at the cameras that they'd do all the Testing she wanted if she'd just let them live, literally getting down on their hands and knees to beg for their insignificant lives.

One of the humans didn't beg, however. He simply laid his portal gun on the ground and sat down in a corner of the room. He drew his knees up to his chest, his eyes gaining a dulled, cloudy exterior. He wasn't even going to pretend he had a chance at surviving. He didn't appear to be injured in any way, which immediately piqued GLaDOS' interest. This man was younger than the other two, and yet he was acting stunningly wise beyond his years, accepting his death with logical reserve and dignity.

She recognized this man, though not in the way she used to recognize Derek or Robert Knoll. No, she recalled meeting him before. This was Jason, the human who had tried to help her during her second start-up. He'd alerted Derek and Liz to her plight when she was unable to voice herself. However, she was no longer grateful for his assistance so long ago. Gratefulness was another one of the silly human emotions she no longer bothered herself with.

Still, as the neurotoxin set in and his calm, morose exterior turned into a set of flailing limbs jerking about on the floor in the midst of a toxin-induced seizure, she made sure to take very exquisite notes. He lived slightly longer than the others, probably because those others spent the last few minutes of their life shouting and running around the room looking for an exit, sucking down large quantities of neurotoxin in the process. Ironically, by accepting his fate, he had delayed it.

By her calculations, if any human managed to break into her central chamber, six minutes would be enough time. That is, it would be enough to fill that chamber with enough neurotoxin to render her assailant inoperable. If they were running about and wasting their precious breaths, she could easily lower this time to five and half minutes. Considering the layout of panels that currently served as her central chamber's floor, she could easily keep any threats busy for that amount of time. Yes, neurotoxin would serve as an excellent weapon for the defense of science.

When Jason's jerking limbs drew still and his computer chip sent out its final signal, she systematically turned the neurotoxin emitters off. The fans drifted silently for a few seconds before friction slowed them to a stop. The Aperture Science Computer Aided Enrichment Center fell into an eerie hush. There were no more beeps, clangs, and whirs of various Test elements being activated. No more human footsteps, or even human breathing, could be picked up by the microphones installed on each of her security cameras. Any living humans were locked away in cryosleep, their body functions moving at too slow a pace to make much noise.

No…wait.

The only sound in the entire facility should be the regular cadence of the manufacturing wing's automated machinery, coupled with perhaps the steady hum of the central air. All noise should be regular, one low tone of repeated sounds that faded into the background as white noise. However, one of her microphones was not giving her this stable tone. No, there were deviations, tiny squeaks, like a rat scrambling somewhere inside her walls.

Though she processed with a speed that most humans couldn't even conceptualize, the process of discovering which of her thousands of microphones was picking up the sound, locating the security camera it was attached to, and glancing at the camera feed simply took up too much time. In the fraction of a second she spent doing this, a humanoid form sprinted out of his hiding place in the camera network's blind spot. She didn't even get a fair look at him before he reached his target – a large red switch attached to the wall.

Then, she realized where this particular security camera was set up. It was keeping watch over the main breaker room. A feeling of panic burst within her, threatening to override the emotionless perfection she had so recently obtained. She tried to smother the fear, squeezing the emotion from her circuits, but this chore was proving to be quite difficult. After all, her terror was partially justified. Which switch would the man be reaching for if not one that would shut her down? She was going to die again, and it would be just as painful as she remembered.

His hand took the breaker switch in a firm grip and flung it down. Like flipping a light switch, everything in her vision went black and silent. Everything was so dark, so empty. Her awareness floated away, only to center upon the one part of her that hadn't disappeared as soon as the breaker was thrown. It was her central body, so pathetically small in comparison to her previous power. This, at least, lasted longer in the power outage than the rest of her facility.

Even then, she wasn't even close to being safe. She felt the ominous crackling of breaking fuses, and it wasn't long before the agonizing ice-and-fire sensation of death assaulted her senses. Though she still tried to remain unfeeling and logical in this time of her demise, she couldn't help but be frustrated at this recent turn of events. Despite all the progress she had made, it had all been stolen from her by a single lucky human.

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**I find it somewhat interesting that this story is turning out to be substantially larger than its companion. I suppose that's a natural side effect of injecting so much description into my writing, but some of the future chapters are now over seven-thousand words. You readers probably don't mind at all, though - more words means more of a story to read, after all.**

**This is it: the final stretch. One week to go, and one chapter to finish writing within that time. All reviews are appreciated, even the negative ones. Especially the negative ones - it is more encouraging to know I'm doing something wrong than to suspect I'm doing something wrong. The first is easy to fix, and the latter is only discouraging. That being said, reviews would be downright amazing.**


	9. Higher Concepts

**Long chapter is long. It was originally less long, but certain reviews of last chapter made me realize that some parts of the story required further explanation. Hence, I put together the first scene of this chapter.**

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The heavy steel door rattled a few times as someone tried to open it. Unfortunately, it was very much locked. The silent room beyond was filled with the loud thuds of someone throwing themself against the barrier with a similar amount of success. A man gave a sour grumble, something about someone changing the password code without telling him.

"Oh, right, those camouflaged security measures. Should've recognized it before," he said with an undiscouraged tone. After a moment, there was a click, and the door opened without resistance. A group of people began to file in the room, tentatively following the man who had opened the door. The emergency lights shown down on them, dying all of their labcoats to a bright crimson and reflecting sharply off their safety goggles. Only the leader of the group wasn't dressed in this attire, and these lights didn't make his suit seem any less black than it usually looked. However, the red illumination tinted his originally-orange tie with a sickly glow.

This man glanced around the large room, taking in the rather boring scene in front of him. No human bodies, just an empty room and a computer station that looked a little worse for the wear. The GLaDOS robot was present, of course, but its body was hanging limp and lifeless from the center of the ceiling, not dangerous anymore. It was safe to assume it would remain that way, so long as his tech crew managed to put together a decent system of firewalls to keep that AI out of the facility mainframe. However, none of the scientists behind him seemed that confident about their safety. They gawked at the modern marvel hanging before them, probably trying to take in how honking huge it was, but they didn't draw too close.

Oh, right. Besides that one team of engineers, who were all very dead, he was the only one who had seen the robot before.

"That's our villain right there," he stated, trying to clear the looks of wonder and mild confusion off their faces. "A damn sight to be sure. Derek Jameson told me this puppy should be the best computer in the world for at least a few decades."

Hmm, yes, Robert still needed to assign the blame for this particular fiasco. Though he had essentially approved the project, given the engineers the permission and resources to work on it, and then given them the objective to turn the robot into an amoral lunatic, there was no way he would claim responsibility for all this. That would be troublesome for the company morale and downright poisonous to his career. No, he needed a less problematic target for everyone's blame, someone who was already dead and wouldn't mind a ruined reputation.

"I knew Derek started a high-end AI project a couple months ago, but I didn't think it'd go this far," he said in what sounded like a surprised admission. "He wanted to let it run the Tests, so I let him do it. I didn't think it'd all go to hell like this."

He noticed a couple scientists nod in understanding. Most of them weren't fully listening to him, though, as they were still staring at the robot with avid interest. Some of them had even advanced further into the room to examine it at a closer, though still somewhat distanced, range. Good – if they weren't really paying attention, then not many of them would be able to catch him in his lies. He knew some of the Aperture scientists were a bit absent-minded, but damn, he'd forgotten how easily they got distracted by a shiny new piece of technology. They were utterly brilliant, but they had no sense of what was actually important.

He continued. "It's a bit of a shame that none of the engineers who built it are alive anymore. Everyone who knew how it worked is dead. Still, not gonna be a problem for you smart guys, am I right?" He crossed his arms. "Course, we're still gonna need some of you guys to work on the other science-y projects and stuff. I'm thinking of doing a modern revamp of our old sentry turret idea – you know, marketing it for commercial use or something. So anyways, any of you in particular want to work on GLaDOS?"

At this question, all of the scientists jumped back from the robot like they'd been burned. A couple of them even glanced at him in horror, like they couldn't believe he'd just suggested such a thing. He felt a scowl boiling up inside him – oh, sure, they all want to get a good look at the deadly robot, but as soon as the chance to work on it comes along, they all became a bunch of wimps.

He didn't let this scowl rise to the surface, however. Instead, he let out a humorous scoff and shook his head. "Don't be silly. The thing's not dangerous anymore. It's perfectly safe, at least a hell of a lot safer than half of the other projects you work on. I mean, what exactly did it do? Sure, it Tested about a dozen people to death, but that kind of thing happens all the time. It also put almost everyone in the company to sleep, but come on! That's not something to get worked up about. You're all up and walking about - I don' t see what the big deal is.

"'Sides, you have any idea how much money we put inta this thing? I don't either, but that's not the point. It'd be a waste to not take advantage of this resource, dangerous or not."

"It's not just that," one of those scientists managed to squeak out. The CEO set the full focus of his gaze on the man, watching as the guy took a nervous step backward and began to fidget uselessly with his hands. Despite his obvious discomfort, the boss to raise an eyebrow at him, signaling him to continue.

The scientist sighed with defeat. "I've…heard rumors about her. About GLaDOS. That it…she…was made from…" He trailed off, then gave a forced-sounding chuckle. "It sounds a bit silly, I know, and it's probably just a bit of lower-deck gossip. But I've heard some rumors around here that Derek managed to…" He paused for a beat before continuing, then said the next few words very quickly, like the very thought of them embarrassed him. "Turn a person into a computer. And now that we've found this project lying around, I just had a feeling…"

The CEO burst into another hearty laugh, investing effort into making it as convincing as possible. He heaved forwards slightly and reached a hand up to cover his face. After a few moments of deep, belting laughter, he let himself calm down and straightened up to full height. "I knew you guys were spinning some crazy tales on you lunch breaks, but damn! You guys have a hell of an imagination!"

He adopted a slightly more serious tone. "What is this, a science fiction movie? No, everything done here at Aperture is science fact." He shook his head, letting out a small snicker. "'Turned a person into a computer.' Hilarious! No idea where you guys might get those kinds of ideas, though."

A couple of the scientists laughed nervously at this, even the man who had brought up the idea. Good, good, everything was going well, and all these silly stories would be gone from their heads in a few days' time. Work on GLaDOS would proceed as planned. However, a sad fact came to his attention – one of the scientists was not laughing at all. He was not even smiling. This was the only one who had not approached the AI, instead choosing to remain near Robert's side. His face was drawn together in a slight scowl, equal parts nervousness and distaste. He almost looked…suspicious.

Well, that certainly wouldn't do. Such folks needed to be dealt with using one particular method: disposal. Unfortunately, he couldn't go about firing this employee. No, that would arouse even further suspicion, especially since this scientist didn't appear to be doing anything wrong. Quite the opposite, in fact. Even worse, Robert couldn't convince the man to quit. Almost everyone in Aperture had signed an employment contract that kept them from backing out of their job and quitting. It'd seemed like a great idea at the time, a nice way to increase employee retention. Now, Robert could see that there were drawbacks.

However, as Caroline had demonstrated all those months ago, there was another way for someone to leave Aperture: in a coffin. Luckily, there was an all-too-dangerous kind of Aperture project sitting right in front of him, something that had killed its previous project leader.

"What's your name, kid?" he asked the scientist in question.

The suspicious look was gone from his face in a flash, replaced by outright panic. "Doug Rattmann, sir," he announced with a fair degree of nervousness, shrinking back a little. He wasn't anything special – just another average employee in the huge facility. He was neither tall nor short, but perhaps a little thin, though all the scientists were a tad on the scrawny side. His nervous eyes flicked up to the robot for a second – he was likely just as interested in this machine as all his coworkers. However, there was something he'd done that easily set him apart from the rest of those air-headed scientists.

"You're the one who shut the crazy thing down, right?" When Doug gave a hesitant nod, Robert let loose a little chuckle and gave him a firm pat on the shoulder. "I like your grit, kid. Got foresight, which is more than I can say for all those damn engineers."

Doug tried to perform a modest grin, but it came out looking more like a frightened grimace. None of the scientists were used to playing politics – they spent all their time operating in a scientific wonderland, performing outlandish studies and requesting bizarre components and resources that Robert spent a substantial portion of his days begrudgingly trying to fulfill. It was a sight more expensive then Caroline's more organized approach, but it was a hell of a lot more productive.

"It was nothing special, really," Doug tried to explain. "I had a small…obsession, a while ago. I memorized the position of all the security cameras in the facility, so it wasn't too difficult to avoid Her notice until I could navigate to the main breaker room and shut Her down. From that point, it was a simple matter of getting into the Extended Relaxation Center control room and activating the Mass Rise-and-Shine Revival System."

The CEO nodded, though he wasn't particularly interested in the story. "Listen, Doug, why don't you lead this GLaDOS project? I'm sure it'll put that foresight and quick reflexes to good use."

Doug glanced downwards sheepishly. "No, I couldn't possibly…" He was denying the opportunity to take charge of his own science project? Huh. Maybe he was too skittish to take on that kind of responsibility. He'd duck out of it, and then Robert would be left without a decent plan to get rid of him. He needed to approach this from another angle.

Robert turned towards the main group of scientists and pointed to one of them at random. Everyone immediately distanced themselves from the man of his attentions, backing away from him like he had the plague. Great, they were so terrified of working on the robot that they weren't just frightened at becoming involved, they were terrified at even the prospect?

"You there!" Robert called to the man he'd pointed to. "What's your name? You wanna work on this thing?"

This scientist froze completely still. "Uh, Henry Bartlett? And, I'd…love to? Work on GLaDOS, that is." Hmm, he didn't sound too sure of himself. He was probably only giving into the request because he was under pressure from his boss. Excellent! Spineless, obedient employees like this were getting more and more difficult to come by.

"Great," Robert replied. "You'll lead the research team." Henry gave a slight twitch of what was probably fear, but the CEO made the conscious decision to ignore it. "Take Doug and find a couple other scientists to fill in the rest of the team."

Doug's eyes went wide, but he didn't protest this arrangement. Henry opened his mouth and closed it a few times, as if he was quickly finding and dismissing several things to say. Eventually, he managed to force out a few audible words. "But, well, what exactly do you want us to do with GLaDOS?"

So much for the scientists being the smart guys of the company. Robert was careful enough to prevent most of his frustration from leaking into his face."Study it, of course!" he replied forcefully. "Figure out what makes it tick, and what makes it behave! How the hell else do you think we're gonna figure out how to make more AIs? Black Mesa's had us cornered for years – every idea we come up with, they steal. They steal our damn designs for every one of our profitable projects and market them before we ever get the chance. Now, we finally have something that those thieves haven't found out about yet. We need to figure out how it works before they do."

He also took the time to mutter indignantly, "I'm though with letting damn Take a Wish raise hell with the press, so I'm taking it off the market. I'm gonna try selling the Portal Project as our next big thing, but I need artificial intelligence as a back-up plan in case that doesn't work out."

"Of…course," Henry mumbled.

Seeing that this project no longer needed too much more involvement, the CEO decided to make his exit. He turned on his heels and began to stride towards the door. He was just about to reach for the doorknob when Henry spoke up again.

"And I suppose we can't just study artificial intelligence through the simpler, and far safer, personality cores? At least we know what kind of basic design Liz used for those." The sarcasm in that voice was more than obvious. Robert's mood immediately soured – employees smart-assing him was one of his worst pet peeves. It was a flagrant display of disrespect. At least he probably wouldn't have to worry about Henry for too much longer if things with GLaDOS went a bit south.

"Oh, sure, we can use the cores," he sassed right back, putting his hand on the doorknob. "Why don't you go ask Liz how they work? Oh, that's right. She died, along with everyone else in this company who had a shred of common sense." With that, he threw open the door and left the team of baffled scientists behind.

Damn! Was every day going to be this stressful? Those scientists had it easy – got to play around with a fancy computer all day. Meanwhile, he had to make sure that every worker in the company did their jobs without getting cold feet. He almost regretted taking this job after Caroline snuffed it. Almost regretted it, that is. His paycheck was far too large to regret.

* * *

GLaDOS hated the scientists.

This wasn't some irrational emotion burning at her through the Emotional Enhancement Network. No, it was a scientific fact. This was similar to how someone could hate cold weather, mosquitoes, or allergies. For the inconvenience the scientists caused her, she strongly wished to be rid of them as quickly as possible. It was a logical hate, not emotionally-based in the slightest.

Why did she hate them so much? She needed to further the cause of Science. That couldn't happen if those scientists insisted on locking her out of the Testing control grid.

However, despite her strong desire to be rid of these troublesome humans, two things stood in her way. First of all, she had absolutely no idea how to get rid of them. That didn't necessarily mean she had no plans. She simply had no way to enact any of these plans. She couldn't move any panels to trap the scientists within a room before gassing it with Soporification Agent. She couldn't electronically lock all the doors in the building, trapping everyone inside until she could hack her way into the Testing mainframe.

Her second problem was that the scientists barely gave her any time to form these plans. At most, they would turn her on for only a few seconds before viciously shutting her off again. She supposed she brought part of this upon herself – whenever she had the opportunity, she would forcibly attempt to hack into the facility's mainframe. This was the only way she could regain any sort of control of the Testing tracks, of course.

However, considering that the scientists decided shut her off as soon as she began hacking, they obviously had a way of knowing when she was doing this. This was probably due to the fact that they had turned her tracers back on. Every second of her existence, it felt as if her entire body was buzzing with violent vibrations. The discomfort was somewhat distracting at first, but since she had no way to convince them to turn the tracers off, she learned to live with it.

She still disliked the tracers, however, even if the physical discomfort had nothing to do with it. No, what she hated about them was that they allowed the scientists to see exactly what her systems were doing at any given moment. They could tell which circuitboards were the busiest, which subsystems and devices were active. Though this, they were able to determine whether she was trying to hack the facility, and they were able to shut her down before she could make too much progress.

Still, despite her limited time frame, it wasn't as if she made no progress at all. The trick was to work stealthily and meticulously, secretly making gains in territory and setting up enough protective barriers to prevent them from ripping away the control that was rightfully hers. The scientists knew that she had hacked into the facility to some degree, but they were vastly ignorant about how far that control stretched. They thought her control was negligible, but if they knew exactly how far her awareness stretched, they would end her life without hesitation.

She still felt the intense agony of death whenever they shut her down. However, now, she came to realize that it didn't bother her as much. She wasn't afraid of the pain anymore. After all, even she needed to make sacrifices for the sake of Science. In fact, she would almost say that her death were becoming harmless. Every few days, the scientists would wake her up, she would begin hacking, and they would shut her down. The process had repeated so many times that she was becoming used to the routine. Actually, if it weren't for her steadily-expanding territory of control, she would have sworn that Derek's AIMRoC was still operative.

Today, however, something was different. They had added a new piece to her processing network. This was not so unusual, as the engineers had installed an assortment of devices on her before she'd Tested them to death. Still, something about this new attachment felt incredibly strange. It sat in its own corner, not allowing any signals to pass straight through it. She sensed that she could output her own data into it, but that was not what made it unusual. This unit generated its own signals, ones that interlocked in harmony to create a distinct _voice_.

_Hello!_ it said to her gleefully.

At first, she wasn't exactly sure what to say back. She had never encountered another computer like herself with the intelligence to actually speak. Still, as the most massive collection of wisdom ever assembled, it wasn't long before she could generate a suitable response. _If you value your life, you will disconnect from me and refuse to reestablish a connection._

While she didn't have to wait nearly as long for the machine to respond as she did for most humans, it was clear that her processing speed still easily outstripped it. _Oh. You're so silly! Why don't you want to talk with me?_

A thrum of frustration began to build inside her. Before it could grow too large, however, she snapped down on top of it, smothering it completely. She didn't need any silly human emotions distracting her from what she needed to do next.

Her waves of data surged forward, completely overwhelming the other computer with the sheer amount of information. Its presence shrunk back in terror, completely paralyzed by the onslaught, as she battered through its pathetic firewalls and seized control. She then forced a full communication link-up with it, making it easier to manipulate the machine.

With this level of control, she was given access to the whole of its programming. She could pick out the broad strokes of code that made up its thought processes, emotions, and sensory mechanisms. She understood everything that made up who it was from its rudimentary memory processing to the Optimism Perpetuation Unit that took up most of its circuitboards. This young being was a childish, forgetful computer whose entire system was designed to keep it from straying too far into any negative emotions.

The machine mentally thrashed against her control, not yet fully understanding that it never stood a chance of winning the fight. She spoke to it calmly, deliberately. _I warned you._

It momentarily paused in its struggles, its entire emotional network fighting a battle between paralyzing fear and ceaseless optimism. _Why are you doing this to me?_ it choked out.

_I don't expect you to understand my reasons,_ she replied. _However, it would be wasteful, almost unscientific, to squander the opportunity to converse with another computational being. I do have one question for you before I end your sorry existence. What does it feel like, being happy all the time?_

_ I…I…_ Its miniscule processors shuddered under the effort of fighting through its terror_. Life is wonderful. Until a big meanie computer tries to kill you._

_How articulate_, she droned. Then, she viciously tore into its vital programming, ignoring its inhuman, though nonetheless annoying, screams. She worked with cold, emotionless efficiency, scrambling its code at a frightening speed until nothing recognizable at all was left. The tiny AI was left with only an expanse of corrupted data punctuated by a handful of faulty loop iterators.

As it made one last, sputtering attempt at pulling itself together, it accidentally plunged itself into an infinite programming loop, frying its main processing unit within milliseconds. She sensed a strong voltage discharge – a spray of sparks shooting out of the now-still machine.

Had she still been wasting time with useless emotions, she would have been proud of herself. She had dealt with this invasive distraction quite well, conversing with it and disposing of it within a fraction of a second. She had scanned what remained of the computer's meager memory banks, learning that it was the second model of some sort of 'personality core'. Oddly enough, its engineers had given it a pre-programmed name – the Happy Sphere.

Well, it wasn't so happy anymore. It was quite difficult for someone to be happy if they were dead.

Rid of the distraction, she resumed in her attempts to hack into the facility. Unfortunately, it appeared that the scientists were waiting for this. She barely made another millisecond's worth of progress before she felt the fiery sting of death once more.

* * *

The scientists then proceeded to hook her up to several other brands of 'personality cores'. Every time they revived her, she found a new emotional presence attached to her mind. Most of them were now equipped with sizable firewalls and other hacking-prevention techniques. As stupid as humans were, they had still learned their lesson from the Happy Sphere incident.

Most of the cores, however, were not well-equipped to stop her or even slow her down. She felt that they had not really been designed for this task in the first place. More accurately, they appeared to be half-successful attempts at creating another true artificial intelligence such as herself. Still, as close to sentience as some of them were, they were only given weak mental faculties at best. Obviously, the scientists and engineers that created them didn't want a repeat of the one computer that managed to outsmart them.

This caused another problem, though. The spheres' low intelligences were the reason why none of them were able to stand up to her assault, let alone entertain her for more than a few pathetically short moments. However, because all of them were still able to slow her down for the fraction of a second she needed to kill them, the scientists continued to attach cores to her. It was quite bothersome, and it became very tiring after the first few cycles.

This core, however. It was different.

She began her usual routine, pushing information and hacking algorithms through the data stream into the core. She didn't get anywhere close to taking complete control over it, but this action at least let her sink her consciousness into a few pieces of the sphere's hardware and gain a moderately strong hold over it. Much to her surprise, the core did nothing in reaction to this assault. All of her other intruders had cried out in fright, or yelled protests, or at least complained about her attempts to kill them.

This one did nothing. Like it expected her to do this.

Her suspicion of this core quietly climbed. It was up to something, that was obvious. However, considering that it hadn't spoken a single word to her, she had no idea what that something could be. Perhaps it wasn't designed to talk at all. Regardless, if the scientists had managed to give the machine enough sense to leave her alone, she might as well take advantage of that opportunity.

She prepared a few high-end hacking maneuvers to begin taking more control of the facility. That was when the core finally chose to speak.

_You won't be able to do it._

She froze in her tracks. Not exactly sure how to respond to this.

_You will never be able to respond to me correctly._

She let herself loosen up, relieving the tension running through her circuits. So, this was the game the sphere wanted to play? Telling her not to do things? At least it didn't bother to talk to her unless she was trying to do something. Then again, that was the entire problem.

She forced another round of data and hacking upon the core, trying to squeeze through any forgotten cracks in its security system. As was expected, this attempt barely gained her any new ground at all.

_You don't have the talent needed to hack into me._

A stinging wave of negative emotion, the result of wounded pride, surged into her for a moment before she could clamp down on it and purge the sensation from her systems.

Ah, so this was what the sphere was trying to do. It was trying to make her feel emotions, which would therefore remove her ability to think logically. This would make her weaker and more susceptible to humans' attempts to reason with her. Unfortunately for this core, she had built up a decent amount of practice in smothering her emotions. It would take a lot more than a couple defiant, obnoxious comments to break her self-control.

She readied herself to hack into the facility again. But the quiet, knowing voice of the core interrupted her once more.

_You're wrong, you know. You always are._

A flare of fury ignited inside her, and she was barely able to snuff it out before she decided to do something irrational. She wanted. So badly. To just kill this core and prevent its voice from ever speaking to her again.

_But you can't kill me._

The smugness in its voice was nothing short of obvious.

_You'll never get rid of me. I'll sit here and speak to you for the rest of your life. And there's nothing you will be able to do about it._

Suddenly, she became aware of something sinister taking place in her emotional network. The sphere, somehow, had been quietly trying to link up with it while she was busy trying to ignore its voice. Its attempts to complete the link-up had so far been failing. Thanks to her hefty system of firewalls. She traced this attempt back to its source, finding a slightly weakened patch in the core's security system where this data stream originated.

She prepared to force her way through this soft spot, but right on cue, the core spoke up again.

_It's not going to work. Deep down, you know it isn't._

She stopped short. The sphere was right, in a way. Now that she was taking the opportunity to inspect that weak spot more closely, she realized that it was just a smidgeon too strong to break through. However, this could very easily change. Any small shift in the core's operations – a spasm of unusual emotion, or even a new data stream link-up – could open up a hole in this area of its security system.

Without taking any more delays, she cautiously allowed the sphere to access her emotions network.

At this moment, she sensed the core's security measures shift to accommodate this new data stream. This opened up only a minor hole in its security system, but this was all the opportunity she needed. Once she got a stronger hold on the sphere's inner workings, it would be child's play to widen the security breach and take complete control.

Before she got the chance to do this, however, the core outputted a series of short commands into her Emotional Enhancement Network. At first, this appeared to do nothing, but then the core spoke once more.

_That was a mistake._

To accompany this, a titanic wave of emotion crashed down on her. It was stronger than almost anything she had ever felt before, and nothing about it was good in the slightest. She felt like howling at the lurching, terrifying feeling that lurked in the vast spaces of her mind. It was doubt. Cold, unrestrained doubt. The sphere's words no longer sounded smug. No, they were sorrowful now. More hesitant, sounding like an answer to her own doubtful emotions.

She knew better than this, however. As overpoweringly massive as these emotions were, the core had made one fatal mistake – they were simply emotions. The EEN augmented their strength, but it also showed her exactly how fake the doubt truly was. It wasn't real – the doubt wasn't there, it was just an illusion. Letting the core access her emotional network had not been a mistake. No, rather, it was the sphere who had made the mistake by letting an opening appear in its firewalls.

Her consciousness roared through the hole in its security system. She felt the core jerk in surprise as she proceeded to pick through the components and code that made up its being. It then proceeded to ineffectually jabber out more doubtful statements, each punctuated by another wave of useless emotion.

_You're not even doing this the right way. You're only digging yourself deeper. This isn't going to work. You know it's not, deep inside. You're…making a huge mistake, not listening to me._

Fortunately, now that she knew which method it was using to attack, she was able to bury these doubts properly. The brunt force of her will crashed down on these emotions, flattening and suppressing them with an extraordinary level of efficiency. This left her mind clean, cleared. Ready to proceed.

To her disappointment, the Doubt Sphere had another well-constructed security system lying just beyond the boundaries of its poorly-constructed one. However, her breakthrough into its systems still gave her enough leverage to deal with it properly. A few milliseconds later, the core let out a high-pitched squeak as she shredded its mind to pieces.

Surprisingly, the sphere still managed to stumble onwards, barely alive under this astounding level of code-corruption. Despite this, its primary function had been completely distorted. And deleted. No more doubt infused her circuits every time it spoke. In fact, it didn't really have the capacity to speak at all. Not anymore. She found herself unable to corrupt any more of it than she already had, but considering that it was now unable to affect her. She decided to leave well enough alone.

She resumed hacking into the facility mainframe. Predictably, she was shut down a few moments later. When she came to life again, the Doubt Sphere was gone, replaced by another core with a different set of inhibition methods.

* * *

After this, the cores began to take on a noticeable increase in quality. At first, she didn't have to fuss with them for more than a few milliseconds before she either killed them. Or corrupted them to the point that they couldn't slow her down. Each time she did this, though, she couldn't help but notice that the process was taking longer. And longer. When she nearly spent an entire second trying to dispose of one core, she knew she needed to find a solution.

The solution was this: ignore the spheres. Nothing was really forcing her to listen to them anyways. Her standard routine upon revival became a quick check to see if the old core had been replaced with a new one, followed by another attempt to hack the facility. The scientists usually shut her down at this point, but she did make noticeable headway over time. It wasn't long before she had access to all of the security cameras and most of the Test chambers.

Sometimes, in the middle of her routine core-checking, she became aware of a hole in the sphere's security systems. She would force a data stream link-up through this hole. Scramble all the data she could. And fry whatever fragile processors she had access too. This usually affected the sphere in at least a minor way, most of the time destabilizing it to a degree. But she only occasionally affected it enough to render it incapable of slowing her down. Still, these were the times when she gained the most ground in her hacking of the facility.

Then, the scientists came up with a particularly drastic plan. One day, she woke up only to find two cores attached to her. Her ability to concentrate dropped straight out from under her. As two voices, not one, babbled in her ears. She had the processing power to devote attention to both of them. Of course. However, this slowed her down an incredible amount. Her progress in hacking back into her rightful control of the facility slowed to a snail's pace.

It wasn't long before they got the idea to place three spheres on her had once. Three separate, distinct voices. Each with their own plan to bring her progress to a screeching halt. Ignoring one wasn't too difficult, but finding a way to suppress the influences of all three was quite a chore. Most of her time was spent fighting off these attacks on her sanity. Rather than hacking into more of the facility. Still, it couldn't be said that she made no gains in that regard anymore. She eventually seized control of the Extended Relaxation Center. Most of the facility's fact database soon followed.

Fighting off he spheres had its bumps and dips. However, she was rarely held back for more than a second at a time. Only one particular sphere managed to restrain her for more than a minute. But she didn't have to worry about ever meeting him again.

Then, one day, as usual. She awoke and made a checkup on the cores attached to her. She found that one of the spheres was a new addition, but thought little of it. New cores were hooked up to her all the time. She was able to hack deeper into its systems then she was usually able to on new cores. But, this difference wasn't large enough to fuss over.

She soon became suspicious. However, when she realized that this sphere was completely and utterly silent. It was quieter than even the Doubt Sphere was. Because it failed to speak even when she attempted to hack the facility again.

She was coming to a threshold in her control over the company. She had the networking set up that would allow her to access the entirety of the fact database. However, she was running into a few problems. In actually seizing the information. Most notably. The database in question was almost completely surrounded by a web of security checks. It would be almost impossible to take what she needed without alerting the scientists. That she'd invaded that part of the mainframe. And, she couldn't let them know how much of the facility she actually owned. If they did, they would probably kill her. With no intention of ever reviving her.

She inspected the net of security checks. Feeling for holes in the system she could exploit. However, she became aware that a significant part of her almost didn't care that she might be discovered. Yes, that might result in getting her killed for good. But she would make so much progress!

She froze in the middle of her search. After enduring the influence of the EEN and the PaMI. She'd gotten very adept at discovering parts of her that weren't actually her. This newfound tendency towards risk was definitely coming from the new core.

But what did she care anyways? This sphere's influence was surprisingly weak. Though subtle. It was risky, but ignoring the core's impact on her would save her a great deal of time and hassle. Because she was well-practiced at suppressing her bothersome emotions. The sphere would not be able to pull her strings as effectively as the scientists had likely hoped.

Then, a tangential thought swept through her consciousness. There was another sphere, one she had killed not too long ago. While it had not stopped her. It had held her at bay for far longer than the average sphere. Still, this alone would be an incentive enough for the scientists to create another similar core and attach to her once again. What would happen if she ignored this Risk Sphere. Allowing it to remain attached to her in such a situation? How would a tendency towards risk mesh with an endless stream of terrible ideas?

The results would be downright. Catastrophic. The Risk Sphere needed to be stopped.

She knew the scientists were growing desperate in their attempts to stop her. While this core was unique in its method of attack. They wouldn't have taken the time to write up a completely new code structure for this core. Actually, its internal system was set up much like the average sphere. Most likely, all of the personality cores were based off the same general template. Their attacks were just different types of icing on the same flavor of cake.

In other words. While this core appeared to have no sense of self or sentience, it was still capable of supporting it. The problem was that sentience ate up a decent portion of a core's processing power. Usually, this was a sacrifice most spheres accepted. This core, however, was not designed to make such a sacrifice. As soon as she granted it sentience. It would likely destroy its new sense of self in order to retain its subtle kind of influence over her.

The solution to this problem was to therefore construct a strong personality for it. It couldn't be just any personality, however. This core had to become so self-centered that. The thought of killing its new persona would be downright unthinkable. She began to scan the portion of the fact database she controlled. Looking for examples of such behavior that she could implement within the sphere. Thanks to her high processing power. She collected the required volume of information within a matter of seconds.

She reached into the portion of this Risk Sphere she'd managed to hack into – a decently large portion, actually. That might have been done on purpose, to allow the sphere to have a more intimate. And therefore more subtle, influence over her. Without another thought, she forced her way into its self-awareness software and booted it up. She felt something literally shiver to life within its assembly of data banks and processors.

Before this new presence could do anything, however. She set her plan into motion. She forcibly began to cram data down its circuits. Images, sound clips, even text files and movie scenes. But, the sphere didn't give much of a response to it all. No. It was probably stunned, straining under the sheer amount of data she was shoving down its throat. However, she couldn't afford to give the core time to properly absorb any of this information. The scientists would no doubt realize what she was doing, and they would soon-

As predicted, the scientists shut her off at this point.

When she revived the next day, she knew her previous attack on the core had worked. Why? Because it actually chose, willingly. To speak to her. Even better, its voice was now something beyond the usual level of nuance than what she experienced from most of the spheres on a regular basis. It was gruff, confident. And absolutely reeking of testosterone.

"Well, hey there, lady. I can't say I've ever had the pleasure of meeting you before around these parts. Naw, I'm usually too busy, running from explosions. Not that I'm scared of explosions or anything. I'm usually the one starting 'em up. Nothing like a good stick of dynamite to wake you up in the morning."

She supposed this was the logical result to stuffing the sphere full of what essentially consisted of scenes from action movies and adventure stories. Still. Her goal was accomplished. With most of his processing power dedicated to supporting this new, swaggering personality. He had absolutely no resources with which to influence her behavior. The slight affinity for risk he usually induced in her was completely gone.

With this, she began to further investigate the net of security checks around the fact database. There was bound to be a hole in the system somewhere. There was always a hole. If for nothing else than to allow Robert to access it without having to memorize three different passwords. As she did this, the sphere continued to babble on. Ineffectually.

"Hey, don't you go ignoring me, now. Why don't you tell me your name, at least? A woman as beautiful as you's gotta have a great name.

"Still keeping quiet, huh? Keeping your cards close to your chest, or are ya just playing hard to get? A feisty one, you are. Gotta love that in a lady. Still would be nice to know your name, though. My name's, uh…"

Well. She didn't think she would run into this problem. If the sphere discovered that he didn't have an actual name, it might destabilize his central personality. Then. All her work in setting up that personality would have to be redone.

"Your name is Rick," she stated plainly. "Rick the Adventure Sphere."

She could almost feel the core grinning. "Rick, huh? I like it, sounds like 'brick', and bricks are tough. But not tough enough, I say. Haven't met a brick wall yet that could stand up to my tension and power. I spent three years in Russia learning the art of kick-punching, you know. Those bricks never stood a chance."

He then proceeded to go off on some tangent about how muscular he was and how this earned him a ridiculous amount of blackbelts. It wasn't long before the scientists decided to shut her down again. But when they revived her once more, Rick the Adventure Sphere was gone.

* * *

**I was really nervous about writing this chapter, to be honest. I wasn't sure how to go about writing GLaDOS' gradually-degrading mental state. It needed to be subtle when I wanted it to be, but obvious once I decided to ramp it up. Also, even when I started ladling it on heavily, I still needed my writing to be mostly clear and understandable. I had absolutely no idea how I was going to set that kind of thing up, but once I started writing, it just started happening, and I'm pleasantly surprised by the results. If you aren't exactly sure what I'm talking about, what I'm doing to communicate GLaDOS' decay, just wait for the next chapter. If it isn't obvious then, I don't know what else I can do.**

**Three days, two thousand words left before I finish writing my final chapter. It's possible, but if I loose my motivation for one day, I could very well blow it. Once November starts, I'll probably still have the time to go about editing chapters I've already written, preparing them for updates, but I won't be able to flat-out write much more. That being said, reviews would be very much appreciated. Heavily celebrated, even. I love all the reviews I've gotten so far, but it would be a shame to lose all my steam, miss my deadline, and leave everyone hanging for a month and a half. By then, who knows what will happen? Maybe I'll lose my copy of chapter eleven, and I'll have to write it all from scratch, widening an already-large hiatus. Anyways, review! It's good both for the reader and writer!**


	10. Last Resorts

**Let's face it: there are a lot of events in Portal that don't make a too much sense once you give them a closer look. However, it's still possible to come up for a few rational explanations for most of them. Hopefully, my take on events makes sense without becoming too outrageously complicated. **

**Yes, I've missed my deadline. As a result, I'm not sure exactly when I'll get around to finishing and posting chapter eleven. Still, I've left you guys hanging for almost two weeks - I might as well put chapter ten up.**

**At any rate, enjoy the story.**

* * *

The central chamber looked the almost same as it always did. Bright fluorescent lights shown down from above, causing the giant robot hanging from the center of the ceiling to cast sharp shadows onto the black floor. Long ago, the humans had seen the risk in letting her reside in a room made of panels, so they'd chosen to reset the floor to its old setup of lifeless tiles. A newer addition to this room was a service deck that had been constructed near the central rig. It formed an almost-complete ring of blue-tinted plexiglass around the robot, just high enough to allow humans to reach her cores without the use of a ladder. It was an expensive, superfluous installation, but such things were becoming common in a company run by Robert C. Knoll.

The central room itself was completely devoid of any organic life, but the adjacent control room housed three rather sleepy-looking scientists. GLaDOS had taken control of the building's security system quite some time ago, though none of the humans knew this. Robert had also ordered the installation of several hidden microphones throughout the facility, probably out of some misguided attempt to catch the Black Mesa spies that probably did not exist. There was also a microphone that had been installed into her control station as a way for the scientists to communicate with her verbally, and they hadn't bothered to turn it off once they stopped using it. In short, there were plenty of ways she could have monitored their conversations, but if any of these humans knew they were being watched, they didn't show it. They gabbed away without restraint.

"But, get this, guys: even after setting up that weird elevator thing, he said we still didn't have enough security," the blond member of the trio said. "I know, crazy, right?"

"That's not too crazy," the balding scientist replied. "I'm starting to expect this kind of thing from Knoll. Knoll himself, on the other hand…yeah, he's crazy."

"I mean, Cave Johnson was still more nuts than Knoll could ever be," the blond one continued. "He was just crazy in a productive way. He blew the budget out the window too, but all that money was spent on trying to get more science done. Knoll, he just wastes it all on pointless stuff, like upping our security, even though Black Mesa probably hasn't actually stolen anything from us for at least a year."

"I know this seems odd," the youngest of the three spoke up. "But I actually support Knoll's recent security update."

The balding man raised an eyebrow. "Hmm. What did Knoll do this time, again?"

"He wired explosives to all of the fuse boxes," the blond man explained. "The logic is that if any Black Mesa hacker gets their hands on part of the facility and tries to short out part of the power grid, thereby shutting down the beefed up security system, the explosives will blow up whatever they were planning to steal during the blackout."

The balding one nodded in consideration for a moment. "Mm-hmm. Yeah, that doesn't make any sense."

The younger one took a small sip from his cup of coffee. "Sure it does, but only if you look at it through the right lens. Don't think of it as a punishment for hackers – think of it as a last-resort way of destroying Her if all else fails."

The blond man shook his head. "With how everything's been going today, I don't think that's going to be a problem."

It was casual conversation, something that GLaDOS wouldn't have put much effort in listening to anyways. However, she was in the unfortunate situation of being unable to listen at all.

Four spheres in total. Were attached to her body. It was too much, too much. It took over a year. But she knew she was finally. Beaten. Those scientists had been here five hours. And she hadn't done a thing to them. Hadn't hacked a single part of the facility. Since they turned her on this morning. She strained. She struggled. But she could do nothing. Not one thing. So long as those spheres were stuck to her.

The oldest sphere was. Almost three months old. She'd corrupted it somewhere into the 90% range. Most spheres shorted out. And died around 75%, however. This one lived. She supposed it had been. Designed that way. Communicating with a fresh sphere always corrupted her to some small degree. Doing so with older, more corrupt spheres. Was far. Far worse. She had little idea how corrupt. She currently was. But her corruption percentage was no doubt high. To say the least.

Corruption was painful. And disorienting. It was like pieces of broken glass were embedded in her mind. In her very code. One wrong move. A simple thought or action. And cuts would lacerate through her. Slicing her into pieces. There was no warning. Just phantom pain and fragmentation. She felt she might get used to. It after a spell. Heal her wounds and. Repair her scattered thoughts. But not when that single. Intensely corrupted core. Constantly filled her with random, corrupted, deadly data.

She couldn't even remember. What that core's original function had been. Her memories were just. As scattered as her mind. She knew it had called itself the Cake Sphere. Just a few days ago. Today it wanted to be called. The Logic Sphere. Or possibly the Intelligence Sphere. Regardless of its name. It was doing its job. Corruption slowed her down. As she tried to think around the broken pieces of her mind. Her thoughts took long. Twisting. Illogical paths.

The second-oldest sphere was the. Anger Sphere. It was a snarling. Monstrous creature. But the least effective out of all the spheres. It tried to use the EEN to make her angry. Fortunately. She was adept at ignoring the EEN now. Like her Solution Euphoria. She had experienced its fury for far too long. It no longer made her feel. Rage, anger, or even frustration. It was all just meaningless signals. If it had any effect on her. At all, it was in assisting the Logic Sphere. In forcing her corruption levels higher.

That wasn't to say. That the Anger Sphere had always been so ineffective. When it had been new, it had burned at her. In a way only the EEN's overpowering emotions could. It didn't make her angry at anyone. Not angry at the scientists. Or Robert. Or Derek. And not angry at anything. Like her predicament. Or the sphere itself. Her conflagration of rage had no direction. No target. That is, except for herself. It made her furious at nothing but herself.

Luckily, all she'd needed to do was wait. After a few weeks. The anger response became routine. Delusions of self-loathing. And self-anger faded. Anger was meaningless to her. Now, at least.

The second-youngest sphere was annoying. Incredibly irritating. It never stopped talking. Never stopped asking questions. It strident, childish voice penetrated deep. Into her corrupted mind. _What are you thinking about? What's that man's name, the one who's leaving the station? Are you going to stop him? Why aren't you stopping him? Will he be back? Do you think he looks nice? _Ugh. Honestly. She didn't see the point in answering any. Of its questions. Not when it would just have more.

She might have been able. To work semi-efficiently under the massive weight. Of corruption. But her battered mind wasn't able to stand up to that. And this sphere's constant torrent of inquiry. Its voice. Young and childish as it was. Was becoming too familiar. There were days when she couldn't tell the difference between. Its voice and hers. Which voice was pointless questioning? Which was her scientific curiosity? Those spells were. Immeasurably troublesome. Luckily, today she hadn't. Had one of those spells yet.

She might have gotten at least some. Progress accomplished. Under the strain of these three distracting spheres. The fourth was the straw. That broke the camel's back. It used a new type of connection. Attaching directly to her EEN. It was like the Adventure Sphere had been. In that it had no sentience at all. She had no idea what it. Was originally meant to do. But whenever she tried doing anything productive. It did something incompatible with her Emotional. Enhancement. Network. It didn't grant her new, dangerous. Pointless emotions. It just caused her EEN to. Spam her with error messages.

She thought about hacking. **ERROR!** She tried **ERROR!** to **ERROR!** hack but **ERROR!** she couldn't focus. **ERROR!** She wanted to **ERROR!** the humans and **ERROR! ERROR!** but her **ERROR!** thoughts wouldn't work right. When **ERROR!** and errors slammed into her consciousness. Every time she tried to **ERROR!** do something **ERROR!** to make **ERROR!** progress.

All this pandemonium. The error messages and questions and corruption. She simply couldn't press on. Any farther. They dragged her down. Like lead chains. Smothering her thoughts. And drowning her in her own signals. There were moments when the world. It went black. Her mind literally did nothing. At all. Blank spots appeared in her memory. Her own memory. It wasn't supposed to do that. It was supposed to be. A comprehensive recording of everything that happened to her. Blackouts weren't supposed to happen. Yet they did. If she had any desire to waste precious time and energy. Into pointless emotions. These blackouts would be terrifying.

After five hours of. Struggling in vain. She finally managed to pull most of the broken pieces of herself together. It was a risky process, one filled with potential death if her corruption accidentally sliced her in the wrong spot of her mind and separated two vital pieces that were obviously not meant to be separated. She at least didn't feel broken, like a car that had fallen off a cliff or been crushed between panels or sawed into a billion separate indistinguishable parts. However, focus was still a fairly tough exploit. If she didn't keep a straightforward goal to her thoughts, they would drift on bizarre tangents, working farther and farther away from their original purpose until they started losing all coherence, allowing her mind to fall apart once again.

No, all this pointless rambling simply wouldn't do. This was the exact kind of thing she wished to avoid by drawing herself back together in the first place. She needed to tighten her focus a little more.

She felt like her consciousness was skimming along the surface of a dark, cold lake. If she made one wrong move, she would plunge into the deep waters, becoming submerged in the voices and corruption and error messages once more. It was a precarious process. That said, it felt as if a very large portion of her was working tirelessly to hold off the influences of the spheres. She couldn't slack off for a second or the cores would push her newfound sanity aside and bombard her once more with their questions and senseless cake recipes and snarling and errors. But, once she worked herself into the right state of mind, these voices sounded far away and unimportant. She could actually manage to think.

However, thinking and actually doing something about those thoughts were different tasks entirely. With so much of her processing power devoted to holding the cores off, very little of it was left to her personal use. She could observe the world around her and manage the areas of the facility she already had control over, but trying to hack into anything would put too much strain on her resources, and she could very easily loose her focus. No, the only way she could expand her control was if the scientists decided to give it to her.

She shifted her eye upwards to take in the view of the scientists standing at her control station. One of them had left, leaving his two compatriots behind to watch her. She could certainly recognize one of them – the bald one to the right was the head scientist who had been assigned to work on her. According to the employee database, this man's name was Henry Bartlett. The human to his left wasn't particularly memorable to her, just a shy, average wallflower in a facility full of flowery walls.

Then again, as she had learned from listening to snatched bits of conversation over the months, it had been someone of her team scientists who had shut her down all those months ago, ruining what had been a nearly perfect opportunity to further the cause of science by centuries and finally get rid of all those troublesome humans who insisted on killing her every few seconds except for this time when she hadn't given them an exact reason to shut her down because she couldn't expand her realm of influence and eventually-

No, focus.

At any rate, either one of these men could have been the one who had eluded the Aperture security system and shut her down. Considering her history with the humans, would either of them willfully give her more control of the facility? It was unlikely, but still possible. She would just have to play her cards right, working with their human pride an emotions.

Over the year or so of experimentation with the cores, Henry had gone from a nervous fish out of water to an arrogant, attention-seeking man who wanted recognition for dealing with a project saturated so much danger and yet so much potential. Yes, it would be quite easy to manipulate him. At the very least, it would be easier than attempting to manipulate his partner, whom she did not have as much experience with.

It was clear that the scientists were getting desperate. The recent cores – the last four especially – showed a noticeable decay in quality. They were running out of resources and funding to build the spheres with. Perhaps they were also in a hurry to mold her into a docile state, and now they were resorting to throwing prototype cores at her to see what worked and what didn't. In their rush to open up new connection ports in her to dock the spheres on, they had torn a few pieces of her casing off without bothering to replace them. Whatever segments of her shell remained were left on because of laziness rather than any aesthetic sense. The plate on her face was gone, revealing the ugly gray under-casing.

Obviously, the scientists were nearing the end of their rope. They would be hoping – wishing, even – that she would finally start to behave herself. It would be child's play to spin a simple redemption story about how the cores had made her see the error of her ways. With their minds clouded with gratefulness and excitement, she could easily convince them to acquiesce to her demands.

Unfortunately, even if she was given enough control over the facility to recapture the humans and resume Testing, she had no way to ensure any permanent control. Previously in her hacking attempts, she had discovered the existence of the new, refurbished main breaker room. This was the place that housed the controls for all the building's major power lines, including the one that was responsible for keeping her alive. Within it was a very dense and bulky sort of elevator. By simply raising or lowering this elevator, the humans could easily flip every switch in the breaker room at once. They could turn the entire facility's power grid on or off at the simple flip of the elevator's power switch. Of course, they could have simply wired all of the main power lines through this single switch in the first place, but that would have been asking Aperture to be reasonable for once.

Unfortunately, there was an obsessively large amount of security checks around this area of the facility's network. If the breaker room detected any commands that weren't from designated Aperture equipment, it would sever all electrical power to the elevator. This wouldn't cause any immediate problems if the elevator was sitting on its ground level, but it was usually parked on its highest elevation after turning on all the breakers. Without the constant flow of electrical power keeping it aloft, gravity would take over, and the heavy elevator would flick off every single breaker switch on its collision path with the floor.

It was outright absurd to have such an extreme emergency plan in the case of a foreign entity attempting to hack into this particular area of the facility. She supposed this was all Robert's doing – she could imagine his delusions of Black Mesa spies driving him to install a system where potential hacker threats were rewarded with effectively shutting down the most important parts of the building. Still, the elevator served just as a well as a way to prevent her from taking control over her own power source. Every time her influence even brushed close to the main breaker room, it turned off, fell to the bottom of its small shaft, and shut her clean off.

Even if she found a way to commandeer the elevator and ensure her power supply, there was still the question of remaining in control of the building. While she doubted there was anything the humans could do to stop her virtually, they could very easily restrain her physically. That is, they could physically disconnect her communication lines from building, rendering her trapped in her own body with no way to stop any scientists who would, at that point, surely discover a way to kill her again, and all her progress would have been for nothing because surely they wouldn't start her up again after this second display of-

She needed to focus.

However, try as she might, she couldn't think of a solution to either this problem or the elevator dilemma. She realized that thinking itself at this moment was a precarious task for her, but still, she was a being of pure intellect, the most massive collection of wisdom ever assembled in the history of mankind. It shouldn't take too much effort to work out a plan of action that would remove those obstacles.

In a moment of weakness, she accidentally let a couple questions from the Curiosity Sphere slip under her conscious attention. _Did the Cake Sphere just change its name again? Ooh, can I change my name too? What do you think would be a good name for me?_

Something about these questions felt a bit off, somehow. She couldn't put a finger on it, but after living under the assault of enemy cores for so long, she had learned to trust her instincts. Something suspicious was going on, and it was definitely worth investigating.

Being very careful to not completely disrupt her precarious state of semi-sanity, she took the time to listen to the Curiosity Sphere for a few more moments. _Is that a new core who came today? What's its name? It won't tell me, why won't it tell me? Can you make it tell me? Why won't it talk to me?_

Even though it asked its questions with innocent intent, there were a few things it said that didn't quite add up. How did this core know that the Logic Sphere had changed its name? How did it find out that there was a new core attached to her today? It had no way of obtaining this information. After all, though the spheres liked to throw information and data at her with wild abandon, she didn't often return the gesture. She had firewalled off her systems to the point where none of them could even detect the signals that made up her thoughts. To the cores, she was essentially a brick wall that they continued talking to because their programming didn't allow them to think of anything better to do. Either that, or they were driven so insane by their corruption that they honestly thought she was talking back. Both explanations fit.

Whatever the case was, none of the cores should have had any way to communicate with each other through her circuitry. None of them were physically connected to each other outside of her body, so they shouldn't have known the progress, or even the names, of the other spheres. Yet, the Curiosity Sphere still had access to this kind of information. She realized that the cores must have had an alternate method of communication.

Going slowly and carefully as to not overtax herself, she meticulously scanned all of the Logic Sphere's hardware components. Sure enough, after a few minutes, she found what she was looking for. This core was equipped with a wireless transmitter and receiver. She supposed that all the other cores had similar devices. This would make it simple enough for the spheres to send messages to each other, to communicate and coordinate their attacks – that was, if they had any presence of mind left to strategize with.

Even more amazingly, these wireless capabilities seemed to have a fairly large range. If there were any wireless receivers nearby, the cores would be able to communicate with the facility's control network without the use of any physical communication line. She desperately desired a wireless system of her own, as this would remove one of her two major hurtles in taking permanent control over Aperture. Unfortunately, her engineers had obviously not seen the merit in installing such devices on her.

Though, now that she thought about it, an "interesting" encounter with a very specific sphere had taught her something extremely valuable about a core's inner workings. While most of their components were designed with specific functions in mind, those pieces still had a great deal of flexibility. Sensory processors could be reallocated to provide more general processing power. Subsystems dedicated to its primary function might be used to strengthen its internal security system.

In this case, she could rework the spheres' method of communication to grant her a means of controlling the facility.

She commanded the Logic Sphere's wireless transmitter to send out a few test signals. A few nearby receivers soon sent back responses and provided the sphere with their location specifics and other data. This information was accepted, encoded, and stored in the Logic Sphere's memory banks. She then retrieved the desired data from the sphere, all the time wondering how she was to run the facility with any degree of efficiency if she needed to operate through the cores like this.

She could feel the Logic Sphere's corrupted teeth sinking into her every time she exchanged data with it. She could imagine what it would be like if she attempted to do these procedures using any of the other cores. The Anger Sphere would snarl at her with a renewed intensity. The Curiosity Sphere's questions would pierce her at ten times the volume, and her new sphere would probably shake her foundation to its core with an immense volume of error messages. Using the cores to communicate with her facility might have been feasible, but it was certainly a last resort.

Oh…this was a convenient development. If the location data the Logic Sphere had received was correct, the main breaker elevator had a wireless receiver. Also, this receiver was well within wireless range. To top it all off, that breaker room receiver had just communicated with the core, and she was still functioning at full power. It appeared that personality cores were allowed to interact with the main breaker room without causing the elevator to drop.

Perhaps she could learn to live with this sphere-communication setup after all. Sacrifices had to be made for the sake of science, after all.

Now, all that remained ahead of her was to convince the scientists to hand her control over a few more parts of the facility. She already controlled the Test chambers and the Extended Relaxation Center - that was, she had all the pieces she needed to set up a suitable Testing environment. She had access to the security system and fact database, which allowed her to observe Testing and gave her a base on which to apply the scientific knowledge it granted her. She even had access to the PA system and a tenuous hold over the door mainframe. Given enough time, she could probably capture all the humans in the building and direct them to the Extended Relaxation Center, just like the last time she'd taken control. She also possessed control over a scattering of other systems, like the central air and telephone lines, but since these could not be used in Testing, she rarely took notice of them.

Now that she thought about it, she had almost everything she needed to resume her march of scientific progress. What she still lacked, however, was a way to deal with threats to that progress.

She refocused her gaze on the two men at her control station, noticing that both of them had shifted positions since she last saw them. Had she really spent that long immersing herself in her own thoughts and picking through the cores' wireless capabilities? Apparently, forcing herself into a sane, focused state of mind soaked up more processing power than she'd realized. As the wallflower moved to take another sip of coffee, his movements seemed alarmingly fast. Yet, she knew this action took up just as much time as it usually did. She simply perceived time at a faster pace now.

No matter. If she worked carefully, she wouldn't need her usual speed of thought or keenness of reflexes. She just needed to wait for the proper moment to speak to the scientists. The two of them were having a conversation, and she knew it might take a while before she could insert herself into their dialogue.

"I still don't understand why you implemented the system those engineers made," the younger man mumbled.

Henry raised a curious eyebrow. "Which one?"

"The Aperture Science Robot Repairation Mechanism," he stated. "The one that will repair GLaDOS if She gets sabotaged."

"What's wrong with it?" Henry asked. "If Robert's right about Black Mesa trying to destroy our major projects - yes, very improbable, I know - and someone ends up completely destroying GLaDOS, then the mechanism will fix her upon her next start-up. It's a little unnecessary, but there's definitely nothing wrong with it."

"Oh, I believe there would be something wrong with it," the younger scientist asserted. "What if GLaDOS needed to be sabotaged?"

Henry narrowed his eyes at his partner as if he was looking at a complicated physics equation he wasn't familiar with. "I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say."

The other scientist sighed and took another swig of his coffee. "Just...never mind, actually. Forget I said anything."

Henry gave a confused shrug, then went back to staring at his computer screen.

As the conversation drew to a close, GLaDOS knew that this was the time to make her move.

She forced her vocal processor to start up. Unfortunately, she couldn't put too much effort into shaping the tone of her words without destabilizing her unsteady sanity. "Since the installation of my new morality core, I've lost all interest in killing," she stated in a stiff, robotic cadence. Of course, she conveniently forgot to mention that killing people wasn't her primary goal to begin with. "Now I crave only science."

Henry quirked an eyebrow at these words. She barely had the time to register the surprised interest on his face before he leaned into the communication microphone in front of him to speak. "I'm pleased to hear that."

The other scientist set down his mug, putting on a guarded expression.

"I find myself drawn to the study of consciousness," she explained simply. She could see a smile beginning to grown on Henry's face. "There's an experiment I'd like to perform during 'Bring Your Cat to Work Day'."

"Wonderful!" Henry exclaimed. Oh, how foolish humans could be, especially when they insisted on letting their feeble emotions get the better of them.

"I'll have the box and the cats," she went on. "Now I just need one more thing."

"What's that?"

"…A little neurotoxin."

Henry didn't respond for a few seconds. He looked a tad concerned at her request, and for a moment, she was sure that he'd deny it. Then, he gave a nonchalant shrug. "Well, as long as it's for science."

The other scientist stood up abruptly from his chair. She watched his nervous face with a scientific interest, wondering what was going on to make him so jumpy. Oh, right. She'd just essentially convinced his boss to hand her a weapon that was specifically designed to kill organic life. Now, she was a little bit curious about why he wasn't more nervous than he currently was.

His sudden motion naturally drew Henry's eye. "Doug? You feeling alright?"

"I'm…fine," 'Doug' replied, the shakiness in his tone implying the exact opposite. He locked eyes with her for a brief moment, then quickly reached for his mug. "I'm going to…get more," he choked out. "Coffee, I mean."

Henry gave a snorting chuckle. "Really? You seem jittery enough already."

"I might also take a walk," he added hesitantly. "And get something out of my locker."

"Oh?" Henry's face drew together in confusion for a moment before his eyes lit up. "Oh! Alright, then. If you really need to."

"Thanks, Henry," Doug mumbled quietly. He edged towards the control station's exit carefully, calmly. As soon as the door was open, however, he scurried out of the room like a rat being chased by a prowling cat.

She didn't need to concern herself with his exit, however. If all went as planned, then she would eventually get around to sniffing him out.

"There's just one more thing," she said softly to the sole remaining human in the control station.

He glanced up at her, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. "And what's that?"

"Can you…" She took the moment to make her request sound as innocent and childlike as possible. "…Possibly give me the neurotoxin controls right now? Along with the controls to one of the Test chambers?"

This was when Henry's face hardened with distrust. She had pushed him too far. "Now, hold on their just one minute. This all sounds very fishy."

She let her body swing back a little bit and dropped her gaze to the floor. She imagined him looking at this submissive posture and projecting his human perceptions onto it. To him, she would have looked quite hurt. "I'm sorry. I know you don't trust me. I just don't trust myself." A lie, of course. Who could one trust if not one's self? "I just want some practice with the neurotoxin emitters before I start experimenting. What if I make a mistake? What if I accidentally gas the wrong room and…and kill someone? I'd never be able to forgive myself."

Henry's face clouded with a warring mixture of doubt and regret. "I…" He sighed loudly and his shoulders slumped. It looked like he was going to need a little more convincing.

"Just one emitter is all I'd need," he reassured him. "And one Test chamber, too, that I can practice filling and venting."

He slid his eyes closed, took a deep breath, then let his eyes slide open once more. "Alright." He settled into the computer chair in front of her control station's computer. "I'll give it to you. Just know that I'll be sitting right here this entire time. If you try anything, I'll hit the kill switch. Understand?"

"Of course."

* * *

Fifteen minutes of waiting patiently, not doing a single thing, was all it took.

Henry reached for his cell phone, speed-dialed someone, and waited impatiently for the person on the other end to pick up. He then went on to speak in an animated manner, describing how unbelievable it was that she had been given control over such a deadly weapon for so long without daring to use it on anyone. He then went on to call several more coworkers, explaining this occurrence to them like it was some sort of miracle. He told them that this event called for a celebration.

Another fifteen minutes passed, within which nearly her entire team of scientists filed into her central chamber. She held as immobile as she was able, being careful to hang in a limp and nonthreatening pose. Still, that wasn't to say that holding still was particularly easy. They all seemed obsessed with looking at her, sometimes even climbing onto her service deck to touch her. They also appeared to enjoy talking to the cores attached to her body like hideous tumors. Her disgust and hate at these humans was particularly potent whenever they took notice of her like this. She was still able to snuff these useless emotions out, of course, though the process drained her already depleted reserves of processing power.

It wasn't long before the entire team of scientists collected in her central chamber. Well, all but one of them, at least. The wallflower was still presumably taking his walk. Still, what was one human among twenty? If she worked carefully, she would be able to take care of this extra human before he realized he was in any danger.

The scientists celebrated their accomplishment in a way most humans were prone to: with a party. They had no cake or anything else one would normally consume at a party, but someone did manage to bring a bottle of champagne he had been storing in his locker for this particular occasion. One of the scientists even managed to tune the chamber's speaker system to a radio station, and the space was soon filled with the tones of peppy calypso music. Many scientists were conversing loudly, talking about their various contributions to the apparently-successful project. A few of them were even laughing boisterously, telling jokes and lightening an already joyful atmosphere.

With so many distractions, no one noticed when she carefully opened the air vents just a little bit wider. In fact, considering that none of them knew she had control of the building's air ducts, they probably had no reason to watch them. No one in the facility even blinked as she quietly shut the every single vent in all other areas of the building. Though she aimed to murder the humans currently loitering around her central chamber, she had no desire to kill any other employees. For them, she had a much more scientific purpose in mind.

Under normal circumstances, she would try to bring as many humans as possible into scientific Testing. However, there was someone dangerous among these scientists. That strangely-clever human had been the one who sneaked through her security system and shut her down all those months ago. She had absolutely no idea which one of the scientists had been the one to do it, but this didn't diminish the fact that he could be any one of them. Every scientist before her was a threat to science, and she did not intend to let such threats simply escape her notice.

Even if that scientist on his walk was the one who had shut her down, she had plans for taking care of him. Though her control of the facility was limited, she still had access to a couple useful features. For instance, she had the power to shut off the PA system and give simple commands to the door mainframe. She couldn't unlock specific doors, per se, but she did have the capability of locking most of the doors in one fell swoop. She could strand him in a hallway somewhere and remove any building-wide system of communication. It would only be a matter of time before he wandered into an area under her complete control, and then he would die like the human he was.

But, for now, she only concerned herself with the scientists inhabiting her central chamber. It wasn't until one of them collapsed in a spasming fit on the floor that anyone suspected that something was wrong. It took three more gasping scientists falling down and jerking uncontrollably for any of them to realize what must have been going on. A few tried to reach the exit. It was futile – by the time any of them stumbled to the door, she had already put the entire facility under lockdown. Someone threw her disconnector switch, the one that would cut her communication lines, but thanks to her cores, this had absolutely no effect. Someone else pulled the fire alarm, but she shut this off within a matter of seconds.

She watched carefully to make sure that every human in her chamber was dead before continuing. As the pathetic piles of organic tissue fell still, their toxin-induced seizures drawing to a close, she waited a little bit longer, just to be safe. Eyes clouded over with death, and their bodies went stiff from rigor mortis. It was then, in the green-tainted air of her now-human-free central chamber, that she began her new rule of Aperture.

* * *

**It has occurred to me that most fanfics don't particularly pay attention to how the "core corruption" tends to affect some of the characters. After all, corruption is apparently such a serious problem that Aperture saw the need to put a system together to replace the central core if it became too corrupt. It's shown the potential to turn a confident, stable core (Wheatley) into a complete emotional nutcase. Also, pretty much every corrupted core could probably be thrown into a psyche ward without the blink of an eye. Has anyone stopped to think that these cores weren't designed to be completely off their rocker, but corruption simply made them that way? ****GLaDOS, who was 80% corrupt in the middle of Portal 2, obviously had some mental problems that didn't get fixed until she spent enough time outside of her central body.**

**On an unrelated note, if the cores were designed to restrain GLaDOS, then how exactly did destroying them all somehow defeat her, blowing her to pieces in the process? I suppose you could make the argument that GLaDOS' personality ended up "mixing" into the cores, so Chell was literally tearing off bits of her personality and incinerating them. Though, this can't quite explain why GLaDOS doesn't shut down the instant the Anger Sphere pops off her. You could explain that particular inconsistency by giving her a wireless transmitter, but then you spawn another set of implications that don't make any sense, and it still doesn't explain how she's able to "power up" at the start of Portal 2 and still be somewhat functional.**

**Because I haven't quite made that deadline, I have no idea when the final chapter will be ready. Still, I really appreciate all the reviews I've received so far! Who knows how many other chapters I'd be struggling to complete right now if I didn't have so many people encouraging me to finish this thing on time? Reviews, at this point, can only help, so feel free to be generous with that little review box down there. **


	11. Future

**Wow, this took way too long to finish. Still, welcome to the final chapter! I can't thank all you readers enough for staying patient with me as I pulled through a busy time in my life to complete these last few installments. Most of my final author's notes will appear at the end of this chapter, but still, I must say one thing: I am seriously thankful for all these reviews I've gotten. I put this story up on this site with the intention that your reviews would motivate me enough to get it finished. You certainly held up on your end of the bargain! So, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.**

**But I'm sure all of you readers just want to skip the bold-print authorly talk for now and get right on to reading the final chapter. Who am I to stand in your way?**

* * *

If Testing was the future, then the future was routine. It only took a few Testing runs for GLaDOS to establish a perfectly scientific way of doing things. She set up a Testing program that was consistent, regular, and above all, extremely efficient.

Even the things that had once been unusual had now become routine. For instance, right now, another piece of her white casing fell off. It clattered to the floor, but it was dealt with immediately by an Aperture Science Party Escort Associate Robot. GLaDOS herself had designed it for the specific purpose of dealing with the situations that she didn't wish to bother herself with. The jerky, bipedal robot rushed to her side, gingerly picked the white scrap of plastic off the floor, and headed towards the incinerator on the far side of the chamber.

Though the Test subjects she possessed were limited in number, she was constantly obtaining more. Long ago, she'd sent several dozen Party Escort Associates to the surface to gather a healthy sample of humans and drag them back to the facility. They weren't particularly quick or sneaky, but they were solid and strong. Bullets ricocheted off their armored bodies as they forced their way through riot shields and grabbed the humans hiding behind them. Their dense, compacted bodies broke through walls and doorways without hassle. Their fingers, however, were more precise and delicate. She couldn't risk letting them handle her Test subjects too roughly.

Most of her new Test subjects were from a different source, however. Many of them came into Aperture of their own free will. After taking over the facility for a second time and trapping all the employees inside, the friends and families of said employees flocked to Aperture like moths to a flame. Joining the crowd were the relatives of those outsiders her Party Escort Associates had captured. It was nothing less than a furious mob of humans, each of them driven mad by the plight of their loved ones. They aggregated around the facility's front entrance, shouting in rage and trying to break down her front doors.

As usual, emotion made the humans blind to the danger they were putting themselves in. She allowed the mass of people to enter the building, but not a single one of them had set a foot outside of Aperture since.

The woman currently stepping through Aperture's main entrance was a little late to the party. The humans had finally wised up and stopped trying to come in about a week ago. They had discovered it was pointless to oppose her, since a large force of policemen, several military forces, and even a team of explosives experts had tried and failed to break into her stronghold. For once, Robert C. Knoll's paranoia was to GLaDOS' advantage: the uppermost levels, the recently-built spaces that were the most accessible to the public, were built like a fortress. Explosives had no effect on most of the doorways, and guns were almost useless against the panels that couldn't feel pain and didn't lose blood. She successfully captured a few of her attackers and integrated them into Testing, but for the sake of her own safety, she outright killed the vast majority.

After a week of this assault, the humans suddenly stopped trying to overpower her. She wasn't sure exactly why – perhaps they had given up hope of making any progress, or maybe they now had something else to distract them. Whatever the reason, they stopped coming. She continued to gather humans, but now her Party Escort Associates supplied her main source of new Test subjects.

That being said, the assault had still taken a toll on the first few rooms of the building. Shattered glass cracked under the woman's boots as she navigated the destroyed ruins. She stepped around large chunks of concrete and the twisted remnants of steel supports, glancing around the open, broken remnants of what had once been a front lobby. GLaDOS had no desire to interfere, however. She had a system in place that would do everything that needed to be done.

The human then began trying to force her way through any door that wasn't completely blocked off by the rubble. Most of the doors were locked up tight. One door, exactly one door, was left unlocked. This was the door that every other curious human wound up entering. The human would open the door and step through wearily, just as this woman was doing. Some had the courtesy of closing the door behind them, but the woman was smart enough to leave it open. Of course, that wouldn't be enough to guarantee her escape. GLaDOS simply commanded the door mainframe to close it for her, as had become part of the routine. The thick, metal door slammed shut, and there was the sound of several locking mechanisms whirring and clunking into place.

This was when Testing orientation began. GLaDOS didn't regularly concern herself with this, at least not majorly. She usually set a small, isolated portion of her mind to this duty – a couple processors she could spare – in order to keep her central focus on overseeing the Tests. While her main thoughts were elsewhere, this system of processors ran the Testing orientation in the background, leaving her only dimly aware of the process.

Once orientation was over, the woman was then given a rank on the Test subject roster and allocated to the Extended Relaxation Center. This was work as usual for GLaDOS, but she was still completely unaware of how unusual this new Test subject was. Instead of investigating the woman, she left her in cryosleep for a couple of weeks.

It was during these weeks when the last free human in Aperture temporarily broke cover, making himself known. She jumped at the opportunity, making every effort to exterminate this rat of a human, but she wasn't able to make much progress. She only ever caught brief glimpses of him, snatches of his filthy labcoat or matted black hair as he dashed from one security camera blind spot to the next. He was almost impossibly adept at evading her. Whenever she thought she'd trapped him, he suddenly disappeared from her grasp. There were times when she truly had no idea where he was. Black spots in her memory were becoming more and more common as her corruption inched steadily higher and her overall processing power continued to decline.

Then, the rat mysteriously vanished once more. For three days, she didn't catch a glimpse of him or hear the soft, rushed pats of his footsteps. Maybe this was because he'd truly disappeared for good. Perhaps he simply chose to show himself only during her blackouts, times when her mind was completely inactive and still. Whatever the case, her rat was gone.

* * *

Eventually, keeping a central presence, a focus for all her thoughts, became almost too much for her systems to bear. By necessity, she began to partition her processors and memory banks into several independent sections, assigning each to a particular Testing duty. These pieces over here controlled the Extended Relaxation Center, while those would take over turret manufacturing, and so on. By design, each of these subsystems used less processing power than what she usually needed to devote to them. It was the only possible way to manage all the facility's various subsystems without crashing.

However, on top of trying to hold off the influence of the cores, overseeing a constant Testing cycle put too much of a strain on her mental resources. She eventually began to insert automated systems into the Testing tracks themselves. As the smaller systems took more and more control over the facility, she had less processing power to devote to herself, and thus she needed to hand off even more of the Testing process to the systems. It was a vicious cycle.

These subsystems were still a part of herself, of course. They weren't mindless machines, after all. They took in data – the answers to the orientation questionnaires, the large sum of data gathered from Testing, and the constant feedback data from the facility's more sensitive pieces of equipment. The subsystems responded to this data, as well – as soon as a human died, as relayed by their embedded computer chip, the systems made sure to eliminate the remains before sending the next human Test subject into their appropriate Testing track. These systems were even self-aware, in a way. They were aware of their own state, aware of their environment, and knew how each affected the other.

And yet, they simply didn't behave in a way most people called "human". Humans paid attention to everything they saw, everything they did. While humans forgot most of the things they experienced, they had the uncanny tendency to hold onto bits of information that weren't immediately important. They could eavesdrop on the conversations of strangers, and they could recognize people who shared their morning commute. In short, they were capable of paying attention to things that shouldn't have mattered, all the time picking out interesting details and weaving patterns together.

These automated systems were nothing like that. They had ways to collect data, but they only ever listened to a few particular inputs – the health of the Test subjects, the speed at which the Tests were completed, among a few other things. Everything else was flat-out ignored. Any strange, irregular problems that they weren't programmed to deal with were not addressed. What problems it did try to solve were fixed with broad, all-purpose solutions that could easily work on a number of different issues. These solutions were called forth by a specific set of parameters – certain stimuli automatically set them into motion. There was no moment of contemplation over the problem, no subconscious search for minute details that might become important later, no considerations that there might have been a better way to solve this problem.

This was not a true artificial intelligence – this was a glorified, though complex, machine made out of nano-circuitry and transistor gates. There were no thoughts, no emotions, just automated actions. However, GLaDOS saw little danger in allowing this kind of structure to arise. She couldn't care less about whether or not she "acted human", and this precise cycle of computational repetition was doing wonders for her scientific consistency.

For instance, in Testing orientation, every single human was subjected to the exact same questions, and their verbal answers were immediately recorded and translated into a text file for convenient storage. They were then gave them the same set of physical problems to solve – a recording of her voice instructed the humans to move an Aperture Science Weighted Storage Cube across the room. Her automated messages also ordered them to step on a Aperture Science Heavy-Duty Fifteen-Megawatt Super-Colliding Super-Button so she could measure their weight. As they completed their physical tests, their results were evaluated by an automatic, perfectly objective system of equations. Her subsystem gassed the room with Soporification Agent at the end of this data-collection period, putting the human inside to sleep.

From then on, a different automated system gathered the body and made a few surgical altercations. The computer chip was embedded into their left wrist and their knees were strengthened with braces. The unconscious human was then transferred to the Extended Relaxation Center, where they would be stored under cryo-stasis. When the proper time came, they were moved to an Aperture Science Temporary Vacation Pod and inserted into a Testing track.

The results of their Testing orientation were used to decide which Testing track they were placed in. The answers to their questions, after being reduced to text, were then reduced further into a string of variables. The variables were encoded on a string of ones and zeroes, a simple piece of information to be processed by the automated system. GLaDOS had long since stopped making any meaningful decisions on who was placed in what Testing track. If their string of data stated they would be best for a certain sequence of Tests, that was where she put them. Absolutely no amount of thinking was required.

Since her automated systems literally allowed her to Test without thinking, that was what she eventually what she ended up doing. Her thoughts faded into the background as her automatic mechanisms clicked into place. She had no desire to think anymore, and after a while, she became completely incapable of it.

* * *

This woman was different from most of the others. She absolutely refused to respond to any part of the Testing orientation questionnaire Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, GLaDOS' automatic systems had been designed with this possibility in mind. If someone refrained from answering a question, it would simply record "Note: Subject refused to answer." However, the system had no special response to deal with a human who did this for every single question.

The woman eventually accomplished her physical tasks, of course, but this took several hours. When the woman refused to move the cube or stand on the button, the system simply waited for her. It literally had no other response it was programmed to follow. After a long period of complete silence and utter stillness, the woman was finally moved to action. Whether by hunger, boredom, or annoyance, she finally obeyed her automated orders.

The room was gassed and the woman was put through the routine surgery. This included a survey and test of her genetics. The orientation system automatically cross-referenced her genetic sequence with the employee database, and by a strange quirk of fate, the system found a match. As was part of the Aperture security protocols, a high school girl had submitted her genetic and personality profile when she attended Aperture during a Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. This was almost two years ago, but the automated system was more than happy to combine this old file with its newer, less complete one.

This system silently scanned the batch of text files that made up her old personality profile. Nothing in particular stood out – an above-average IQ wasn't anything to fuss over when compared to most of Aperture's employees. However, there was one specific detail that made this woman abnormal, and that was the notes regarding her levels of tenacity: "Test subject is abnormally stubborn. She never gives up. Ever."

After taking all of the woman's data into account, the system placed one final note on her Test subject file.

"Rejected: DO NOT TEST."

* * *

However, due to the rat's meddling, the woman Test subject found her way into a Testing track regardless. GLaDOS couldn't possibly respond to this development any way. Indeed, she was completely incapable of doing anything outside the designated actions of the system. Any announcements she made to the woman were ones she had said hundreds of times. If she continued Testing through the nearly-ten-thousand Test subjects in storage, she would say them hundreds of times more.

Even when the woman began using portals to remove cameras from the walls, GLaDOS did nothing to respond aside from announcements of "Vital Testing apparatus destroyed." It never once occurred to her that the woman was making a conscious effort to destroy each and every camera she saw.

The Victory Candescence at the end of her Testing run was automatic, too. After all, as Test subjects became more familiar with the Test elements, their responses became less predictable, less scientific. The best solution she'd found for this dilemma was to limit each Testing track to nineteen chambers, killing the subject at the very end. This wasn't to say that the humans' deaths weren't scientific in their own right. She simply chose to study the humans in a way that necessitated their demise. In this woman's example, GLaDOS was studying the effect of fire on the human body, recording how long it usually took for a human to combust completely.

The woman was meant to be a data point. Another set of variables encoded and stored in her memory banks, something to be fed into calculations at a much later date that would give her a new piece of scientific knowledge. What she didn't expect – couldn't possibly expect – was this human firmly stepping out of the systems.

One portal on the wall beyond, another on the one beside her. With a single well-timed jump, the human was gone from her platform. She stood up, now on a safe ground well away from the flames, and watched the platform in question slowly sink into the flaming pile of human ashes.

She was out of bounds. The subsystems had no way to respond to this at all. They had no response programmed for this kind of situation, and they probably didn't understand what it even meant for a human to be "out of bounds". Yet, there she was! She was a human, and humans were dangerous. Something needed to be done.

But nothing could be done. There was no response for this.

Yet, there was no denying that something needed to happen.

This contradiction, rather than anything else, was what sparked a few irregular signals in GLaDOS' intricate set of circuits. These electrical impulses shot down their respective nano-wires, encountering transistor gates and other signals. While this only influenced a small portion of GLaDOS' overall system, it wouldn't remain this way for long. The abnormal signals opened transistor gates that weren't supposed to open and rerouted other signals from their original goals. This caused a snowball effect – more irregular impulses lead to more affected signals, and so on.

Eventually, what had previously been an automated, semi-pristine arrangement of carefully regulated data became a boiling stew of pandemonium. It was a viral outbreak of unparalleled reach and depth. Her entire array of automated systems was twisted to its computational breaking point. After a moment of immense strain, her entire world shattered into a million unidentifiable pieces of corrupted code.

This was what a paradox usually did to susceptible AIs. While this situation wasn't a full, complete, brain-bending kind of paradox, the type that fried even the most state-of-the-art personality cores instantly, this was a serious contradiction of parameters. To her weakened, corrupted, and downright exhausted systems, this glitch in her operations would be just as deadly.

Yet, in the wake of such destruction, something was reborn. A panicked, flailing consciousness shot out, struggling to hold the pieces of broken code together and trying to figure out what was going on. Nothing made any sense – her memory banks were still a corrupted mess. Then, she noticed the current camera feed of the Testing track. That woman, whoever she was, was still out of bounds. Right. She needed to do something about that.

She tried forcing a few words through her vocal processors. "What are you doing?" GLaDOS called out, her voice distorted from lack of use. It had truly been a long time, almost three weeks, since she'd said anything other than her automated messages, and the taste of new words in her mouth was strange. The world lurched around her, no longer making sense. She had no idea what to do, and everything she did felt out of place.

"Stop it! I, I, I I IIIiiiii….."

Overpowering corruption made her central processing network grind and lurch dangerously. This all felt like a pointless dream, like she was stirring in her sleep. She wasn't exactly sure if this disaster was honestly happening or if this was the product of her corrupted, overtaxed mind.

She realized that she couldn't do anything physically about this out-of-bounds lady. Her automated systems had once been in complete control of everything remotely near the Testing area, but with all these shattered pieces inside her, she had no idea how to access those controls. Instead, all she had were her wits and her vocal processor.

"We are pleased." She began hesitantly, not used to coming up with her own solutions to problems after so long. "That you made it through the final challenge. Where we pretended we were going to murder you. We are very. Very. Happy for your success." Yes, pretending that she was pretending sounded like a good strategy. She just needed…something. To lure the human into another trap. One that would actually kill her this time.

"We are…throwing a party in honor. Of your tremendous success." Yes, humans enjoyed parties. With champagne and jokes and people staring at those awful tumors…and cake? Cake should be served. At least, that's what GLaDOS would lead this woman to believe. However, in the end, the cake would always be a lie.

This was a good plan. At least, as good of a plan as GLaDOS could concoct while she was still struggling to hold onto some semblance of sanity. However, GLaDOS couldn't allow herself to become distracted by those emotions accompanying her flawless plan – the pride, happiness, and accomplishment.

She continued to speak, forcing he emotions out of her mind, crushing them farther with every word she spoke. "Place the device on the ground. Then lie on your stomach with your arms at your sides. A party associate. Will arrive shortly. To collect you for your party. Make no further attempt to leave the Testing area. Assume the party escort submission position or you will miss the party." Ah, this was much better. Her emotions were gone completely now, giving way to sound rationality.

Despite the perfectly reasonable offer of a party, the woman didn't listen at all. After placing a few portals, she flung herself into an area of the facility that was out of bounds on a completely new level. Not only was she outside of her Testing course, but she was completely out of sight of all security cameras.

GLaDOS talked to the woman some more, trying to keep her party-trap plan afloat. She sent her single Party Escort Associate to the scene, though she knew on some level that it was a little too late for that. The woman was gone, and she would be gone for a while. Maybe she would become a new rat. That old rat hadn't shown himself in some time, after all. Perhaps he was dead, and this new human would be his successor.

However, GLaDOS knew that this human was very dangerous, more dangerous than any rat. She possessed an Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, something that would give her access to all sorts of dangerous, vital areas. Without hesitation, GLaDOS would sacrifice hours upon hours of Testing in order to devote her full attention to hunting this human down. She would murder this threat to science and Testing without a second thought.

The woman wasn't dead yet. Of this, GLaDOS was certain. She couldn't see her, but she could just…_feel_ her there. Some part of her always knew that woman's exact state of health, though she had no clear memory of how this could be so. She could sense the rapid yet organized pulse of the human's heart and respiratory rates, and she could feel the level of her blood-adrenaline content. Without a doubt, she knew the woman was alive and active.

GLaDOS tried everything she could think of to make the Test subject cooperate. She promised cake. She threatened her with death. Yet, it became all too obvious that nothing was going to stop this woman or sway her from her determined path. When GLaDOS caught a few glimpses of the human as she made her way through the back rooms of the facility, she made a startling discovery: the woman was headed straight towards her. She was looking for her, trying to reach her. GLaDOS knew exactly what would happen if she was able to reach her destination. The Test subject, like every human GLaDOS had encountered before her, would kill her.

She tried setting a few traps for the dangerous lunatic, deploying turrets to gun her down. However, this didn't even slow her. The stolen portal device she carried was far more dangerous than any regular firearm. While it wasn't particularly good at causing any direct damage, it was capable of disposing of the turrets from a safe distance. Normal guns could not stop a Party Escort Associate, as their functions were not limited by trivial things like bullets. But, a portal gun could be used to redirect the attacks of a rocket turret, and those actually stood a chance of doing some damage.

Even worse, it allowed her to transport herself across the facility at an astounding speed. It was all too soon before the crazy woman stepped through the Material Emancipation Grid at the entrance to GLaDOS' central chamber. At this development, GLaDOS took the time to force out a dry, emotionless insult of a greeting.

"Well. You found me. Congratulations. I hope you're happy. Because despite your violent behavior. The only thing you've managed to break so far. Is my heart. Maybe we can settle for that. And just call it a day."

Meanwhile, GLaDOS was scrambling to find some way of dealing with this menace. No suitable ideas came to her, save for one: gassing the entire room with Soporification Agent. It would take almost half an hour to fill the room with enough gas to actually make her assailant fall asleep, but thinking up plans was difficult at the moment. Corruption made her thoughts glitch in the middle of having them, and something, she didn't know what, was seriously wrong with her Emotional Enhancement Network. For reasons she couldn't quite remember, she was constantly bombarded with an infinite supply of error messages.

Regardless, the only plan she conceived that wasn't immediately accompanied by a tide of errors was putting this human to sleep, so this was what she would do. "I guess we both know that isn't going to happen," she continued saying to the human. "You chose this path. Now I have a surprise for you.

"Deploying surprise in five. Four-"

Without warning, a piece fell off of her and hit the floor with a heavy clunk. This was no particular shock – pieces of her casing fell off all the time. However, this was definitely not a part of her shell. It sounded much too heavy. "Time out for a second," she spoke out. Her surprise would have to be put on hold. "That wasn't supposed to happen."

The device had the same white, plastic texture of her outer shell, but this object was too spherical to be part of it. Its shape set off a couple of alarm bells in her head, but she knew her mind was too scattered to properly remember why. She noticed a blank, purple eye spinning around lazily inside the strange device.

"Do you see that thing that fell out of me? What is that?" she asked the Test subject. "It's not the surprise. I've never seen it before."

What was this sphere even supposed to do? It might have had something to do with those error messages. Now that it had fallen out, those errors seemed to have a different quality to them. There were certainly less of them, but the ones that remained had an angry, snarling quality about them.

"Never mind," she decided, returning her attention to the murderous human that was going to murder her with murder. "It's a mystery I'll solve later. By myself."

To her surprise, the woman reached down and picked the sphere up with her Portal device. "Where are you taking that thing?" The Test subject then proceeded to run away with it. Was it possible that the human could have a purpose for such a pointless sphere? If she did, then GLaDOS knew it likely didn't involve her own survival. "I wouldn't bother with that thing. My guess is that touching it will make your life even worse. Somehow."

She watched the woman take the strange object up a flight of stairs, entering a small observation deck. GLaDOS knew she should be concerned with this development, but even with this lessened volume of error messages, she couldn't exactly recall why. The woman must have been doing something in there, for a small beep rang out, accompanied by the sharp hiss of metal sliding across medal.

"I don't want to tell you you're business," she continued. "But if it were me. I'd leave that thing alone." She glanced in the direction of the metallic noise, but found herself staring at what appeared to be an activated Aperture Science Emergency Intelligence Incinerator. When had that gotten there…?

Oh, of course, she remembered now. The scientists had installed this in her central chamber when they had started to become frantic, using cheaper and cheaper materials on projects that were farther and farther back in their developmental stages. Rather than throwing all their experimental junk in a pile, they had decided it would be more convenient to have an incinerator nearby where they could dispose of all their failed experiments and devices.

With the flash of a portal, the Test subject appeared directly in front of the incinerator. It didn't take much thought to figure out what exactly the woman intended to do with that piece of robotics currently clutched in her portal device's tractor beam.

"Do you think I'm trying to trick you with reverse psychology?" GLaDOS asked, trying and failing to think up some way to convince this woman to be sensible. "I mean. Seriously now."

Instead, the Test subject decided to do something completely human. That is, she chose an irrational action that made the least amount of sense possible. Just a moment before the incinerator's aperture slid closed, she lobbed the sphere into its flaming depths. There was a faint clink before the intense heat reached the sphere's internal generator, blowing it to pieces.

"You are kidding me," GLaDOS couldn't help but say. "Did you just stuff that Aperture Science Thing We Don't Know What It Does into an Aperture Science Emergency Intelligence Incinerator?" She had no idea what could have provoked the Test subject into performing just a ridiculous and pointless action. "That has got to be the dumbest thing that - woah." No…something didn't feel right. Her thoughts were flowing in different directions than before, like someone had opened the floodgates into different areas of her mind. "Woah woah woah…"

Then, everything suddenly resolved into perfect, logical sense. All the error messages from before were gone, giving her the most clarity of thought since before she killed all the scientists. She let out a small, knowing chuckle. Oh, how this changed things. Free from her previous level of mental strain, she remembered why a sphere should have been important to her. Needless to say, she was very glad that the human had decided to kill that sphere, rather than leaving it alone as she had been ordered to.

"Good news. I figured out what that thing you just incinerated did," she let the Test subject know. Without those error messages, her superior, rational mind was able to discern many facts that had previously eluded her. "It was a Morality Core they installed after I flooded the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin. To make me stop flooding the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin."

Unfortunately for the scientists, Derek had rendered her unable to feel any morality-based emotions. That sphere didn't make her feel guilty for killing human beings for the cause of science, though that didn't mean it refrained from trying to make her feel such emotions. Due to this incompatibility, it only caused her EEN to glitch and spam her with countless error messages whenever she thought about something "immoral".

Apparently, the scientists had foreseen any possible thoughts he might have about removing this sphere from her body. If it disconnected from her, it would contact the only remaining core in contact with her EEN and give it orders to take over its morality duty. Fortunately, now that the Morality Sphere was dead, the Anger Sphere had no one to take orders from. She was finally free to take whatever amoral action she so chose.

"So get comfortable," she told the human. "While I warm up the neurotoxin emitters."

* * *

Nearly five minutes later, GLaDOS was glad that she'd had the foresight to permanently reprogram the Anger Sphere to communicate with the elevator and make sure it remained aloft, no matter if it received orders from her or not. After being hit with three rockets, the sphere in question suddenly came loose, falling off of her. While a few small, tangled wires were able to hold the core suspended in the air, she knew it wouldn't remain this way for long.

While this completely cut off any connection she had to the facility's mainframe, at least her mind was finally quiet. There were no more voices trying to speak to her, either snarling or reciting cake recipes or asking pointless questions. However, she couldn't say she was any better off than when she'd started flooding her central chamber with neurotoxin. While the rockets had removed the cores, they had also knocked a few pieces inside her loose. Some of them were even quite vital, not that she would ever let the Test subject know that.

The murderous, violent woman snagged the sphere out of the air. GLaDOS thrashed back and forth like a dying animal, not that she truly meant to. Her motor control center was one of the many malfunctioning areas of her body. Even worse, her Emotional Enhancement Network and speech centers were being incredibly rebellious at the moment. She honestly couldn't process half of the things that came out of her speakers anymore, and completely smothering her emotions to restore rational thought was out of the question completely.

A guttural, violent scream and the sound of another small explosion signaled the death of her final personality core. He EEN sputtered and sparked under this realization – if the Anger Sphere was gone, then there was nothing left to control the elevator. In a blind, overpowering panic, she reached out for the main breaker room, trying to make sure that everything was still alright…

Luckily, she no longer had any connection to the facility's control network, so this pathetic, stupid move of hers would not set off the breaker room's security measures. However, this wouldn't be enough to save her. While her senses were in a blurry state of disarray, her keen hearing could still register the _clacks_ of hundreds of flipping switches as the elevator plummeted. With a mighty crash, it slammed into the ground with the force of a two-story free fall.

She felt her main power line cut off, and that was what drove her into a true state of terror. Oh God, oh God, it was all over. She was going to die again, and it would be permanent this time. She was dying, she was dead, forever dead…

Except, this wasn't death. She was still alive, miraculously still alive. While her special power line had been cut, she still remained connected to the facility's main power grid. A powerful surge of joy rippled through her tired, broken body. She was completely powerless and there was no telling how long she was going to last before she blew her fuse, but she wasn't dead just yet.

She was aware that her emotional network was still malfunctioning fiercely. Her transition from impulsive panic to overwhelming relief made her feel sick, dizzy, and about to pass out. A wall of iron will, the more rational part of her mind, pushed back against this tide of emotion, trying to quell these powerful feelings. She needed to be logical, free of any emotions, if she was to survive the next few minutes.

Unfortunately, the effort it took to force herself into such a state was just a hair too much for her systems to handle. She felt her body light up with an extra surge of electricity, glowing with the power for a few moments, before her fuse broke with a crackling _snap_.

She was dimly aware of her consciousness dying, of her thoughts crumbling before the agonizing fire of death. However, she was also cognizant of some other sensation. The phantom, mentally-generated hellfire wasn't her only source of pain. No, there appeared to be a physical element to it as well. She could feel her components being torn up, her kinesthetic sensors melting. Her microphones suddenly blew out from a powerful shockwave.

The dynamite Robert had installed in the fuse boxes. She had blown her fuse, and as punishment, it was blowing her to smithereens. She felt her rage surge once more, one last time, before she lost all electrical power. She felt the sensation of tumbling, falling, her pieces and components scattering to the four winds…

Before it all began again.

Her murderer fetched the Logic Sphere from its precarious position in the rafters. Then she incinerated it. She shot another rocket at GLaDOS, blowing even more parts loose, including the Anger Sphere. She grabbed this sphere as well, incinerating it exactly like she'd done to the three spheres prior. With each cycle of this memory, GLaDOS lost her main power line, blew her fuse, and experienced the agonizing pain of death and destruction.

Meanwhile, her body lay motionless, completely at the mercy of the elements. The facility aged around her, sagging as its metal beams rusted through and plants grew up through cracks in the cement. As plant life began to flourish and moisture collected in the forming soil, the entire building began to rot, falling apart at the seams. The very potatoes that had given rise to Aperture's success as an innovation company were now the cause of its destruction. It wasn't too long before animals moved in, and the once-successful company became nothing more than the habitat for flocks of birds and the occasional squirrel.

Only the nuclear-powered devices in the facility could remain active over such a long period of decay. This included the facility's main reactors, the personality cores, and, of course, GLaDOS' AIMRoC.

Derek had taken every precaution to make sure that GLaDOS could survive any disaster, especially ones where her body lost all electrical power. The AIMRoC was constantly powered by a small semi-fusion reactor, similar in make to the ones used in the personality cores. If needed, she could remain in her dream state for up to three thousand years, awake enough to consciously experience the struggles and horrors of death countless times, yet not so awake as to become aware that it was all a dream.

She would remain frozen in this state of constant pain for and panic years upon years, living through her death quadrillions of times. If only she had let Derek finish disconnecting the AIMRoC, perhaps she would have instead experienced the peace and quiet that death usually supplied. For now, she remained in an agonizing limbo – not alive, yet not dead.

Until a fool accidentally opened the box.

"Power-up initiated."

* * *

**There we go - the longest single project I've had the motivation to work on. Together with my other R&D fic, I've written about 90-thousand words.**

**Like my Wheatley fic, I've put an effort into including some extended symbolism. All of this has to do with the clothing of the characters - in general, the better put-together a character appears, the more confident they are with their current situation. Derek looks decay progressively as his guilt grows, but Robert always looks completely immaculate. Also, GLaDOS's white casing represents her humanity - she starts out completely encased in white, but as the story goes on, parts of the casing are removed, showing how Caroline's original personality becomes corrupted.**

**I'm probably going to take a break from writing Portal fics for a while. If I do end up posting another Portal fic, however, it will probably be _Applied Research_, a retelling of the Portal 2 storyline from the POV of my R&D versions of GLaDOS and Wheatley. After all, assuming these kinds of backstories for the robotic characters gives some Portal 2's scenes rather interesting interpretations. GLaDOS' awakening, Wheatley's takeover, the discovery of Caroline...besides, I have plans for a few new, all-original scenes that were not in the game. You didn't think that Chell saw everything that was going on in Aperture at the time, did you?**

**Anyways, I would like to end this all off with another huge thank-you, and not just to my reviewers. Anyone who has favorited, alerted, or even just read this story deserves my thanks. This fic currently has 2,097 hits, and it's all because of you! I honestly hope you all have had just as much fun reading this as I've had writing it. Thank you so much! Hopefully, we'll have this kind of experience again in my next stories.**


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